The Ecuador project is along similar lines to CR, there are 18 volunteers and we live in a camp in the middle of nowhere. We are in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, and the landscape is really hilly and with loads of little streams here, there and everywhere. When it rains it gets really muddy, and we spend our lives in trousers and wellies, skidding down hillsides on our bums! the camp consists of wooden buildings on stilts, there's the kitchen and comedor (dining room) which is where we spend most of our time when on camp, then there are the volunteer dorms - there are 5 guys and 13 girls, and i am in a dorm with 4 other girls, but all the dorms are in the same hut, so you can hear everything right down to farts and snoring from the other dorms! There is another building where the staff live, and there is a small library (room with a table and a few dozen books) plus another hut for the Ecuadorians who stay on the reserve with us. Of course, there are also showers (freezing cold ones!) and toilets, which are over 100 paces away from my bedroom, and 35 of those paces are actual steps. like i said, it's so hilly here that we are permanently going up and down steps and hills... my leg muscles are like Arnold Schwarzenegger's now!
The other volunteers are mostly from England (Ella, Hayley, Laura, Sherry, Nicky, Hells, Sasha, Jane, Jamie, and Phil are all English) then there's Rikard from Sweden, Bells and Mark from Ireland, Kristen and Catherine from America, and Tim from Australia. We are a mixture of people here for 6 months, 10 weeks, and 5 weeks. Plus there are the staff: Andy, Olly, and Caroline from England, Jaz from Australia, Jenn from Canada, and Mel from America. Added to that are 4 Ecuadroians who are staying on the camp at the moment (new students come every month) and they are Isaac (the teacher) plus David, Cristian and Galo - they are students at the technical college we are partnered with and they come onto our camp to help them learn English.
I tend to hang around mostly with Ella, Hayley and Laura, or the Ecuadorian lads, as my Spanish is coming on in leaps and bounds. I am now able to say most things i want to say. it may have poor grammar, and make use of words like "this thing" but i can say most things i want to... however, i don't always understand the response, but hey, they are supposed to be learning English anyway!
There is no such thing as a normal day, and there are so many different activities it's easy to lose track! but i'll try describing some of the things i've done. until 2006, the reserve was just a normal, natural piece of rainforest, with animals living there, small communities (ie, 5 wooden huts) scattered about nearby, and walking tracks were used to get from A to B. but in 2006, the government built a road thorugh the middle of the reserve, and now a lot of the projects we are doing are to assess the effect which the road has on animal populations and behaviour. Here are some of the things we've been doing:
Butterflies:
To see how the road affects butterfly prevalence, butterfly traps are set up on the road, and then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, and 500m away from the road, and the catches are compared. this is done in 4 different sites, and each time with a trap at ground level, and a trap in the canopy (12m ish). A butterfly trap is a brown plastic tray a foot in diameter, with some manky mushed up banana in it, and above that, a cylinder of mozzie net about a metre in height. the butterflies are drawn in by the yummy overripe sickly smelling bananas, and then when they want to leave they fly upwards and are thus trapped! we come along every day and empty the traps. you genereally find 0 or 1 butterfly per trap. the butterfly is then ID'd to species level, and marked on its wings so that recaptures can be studied if possible, and then the butterfly is realeased. I've only done this project once so far, and it's easy enough to do the traps, but the terrain is shockingly bad - see below
Mammals:
They are going to begin a project checking the prevalence of mammals at various intervals up to 1km from the road, and these tracks need to be cut into the forest, so at the moment, going mammaling entails going into untouched jungle, and cutting tracks into it. it seems kind of weird, as when i knew i was coming to the Amazon, i never for a moment thought i'd be cutting it down! we use machetes and we only cut a small trail, and it is actually really good fun. we only cut down small plants that are in the way, and the forest fights back, as any track which is left for a couple of weeks, it's really hard to find where it was! again, the terrain is crazy and ridiculously difficult, see below. Once the tracks are up and running, they'll use sand pads to look for prints.
Pitfalls:
They are monitoring which types of habitats (primary, untouched; secondary, farmed with coconuts or coffee plants; or riparian, near the river) frogs and lizards prefer. there are 4 buckets set into the ground, with plasitic sheeting held vertically between them, and when a frog or lizard comes upon it, it can't get over the plastic, so tries to go around, and in doing so, falls into a bucket. we check these every day; the animals are ID'd to species level, measured and weighed, then released. it's normal to find 2 or 3 in a morning.
Point counts:
They are seeing the effect of the road on bird populations at various distances from the road, and so this project involves going to various points, one on the road, then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m and 500m from the raod, and sitting for 10 minutes and listening for bird calls, and writing down all the bird calls we hear. Yay!! this is one of my favourite activities as i know loads of bird calls (but we are learning more all the time) and it's fun and peaceful to sit and listen to the sounds of the rainforest. you can generally hear about 10 or more species calling at any one point. again, hte terrain is crazily difficult between each point though. see below.
Mist netting:
I can't quite remember the reason for the mist netting experiment - whether it is to monitor the effects of the road, or something else. anyway, it involves setting up mist nets to catch birds in flight. a mist net is a really fine mesh which you really can't see and can accidentally walk into it if you're not looking! the nets are opened, and are then checked every half hour, and any birds are removed, and then ID'd to species level, measured, weighed, and then released. in a morning (say 5 hours) we might catch between 2 and 15 birds.
it's a lot of fun seeing animals up close like we do here, but some people (me included at times) have been concerned that the processes are unnecessarily cruel. i don't think any of the projects are that cruel though. it's probabaly not a fun experience for the animals, but they are processed (ID'd, weighed and measured and released) in a couple of minutes, or about 10 minutes fro the birds. it didn't sit well with me initially, but now i am confident that the animals are not harmed in any way, and the second they are released, i'm sure they aren't stressed out any more, and forget about it pretty quick
The terrain:
as mentiioned above, the terrain here is crazily difficult to get around. whether on a newly cut track, or an old faithful, the floor is muddy, with wet leaves and dead sticks all over the place, which makes it really skiddy and slippy eveen on the flat, but the land is never flat, and you go up for say 40 paces, then down a hill for 40, then along a stream for a minute, then climb up another bank, then down the next one... and if the mud weren't difficult enough on its own, there are loose rocks, roots sticking out of the ground, vines that are like nature's tripwires, all working together to make you fall over and skid down hills on your arse or knees. You're not supposed to grab onto trees or roots in case they have spiders or thorns or they are loose, but you can't help it, and if they are loose or rotten or whatever, you slide down the bank. the gradient is often above 45 degrees, and somtimes it's almost vertical! it can be a lot of fun to scramble around in this way, but you can also get lots of bruises and you are always covered in mud.
the weather here is around 30'C in the daytime, but ridiculously humid. the humidity reading is usually aroung 98%, but sometimes it's been 100%... i would have thought that that meants we were actually IN water, but maybe not. suffice it to say that it's bloody humid. if i put on a dry tshirt and go out on a walk, within half an hour the sweat patches are bigger than the dry patches, and i can cover the whole thing in sweat within 2.5 hours. yes, the whole tshirt soaked with sweat. that is my record, but i think i could beat it. my legs ache from all the going up and down - it's like going up and down stairs for a few hours a day! i am definitely getting fitter but i am also getting knackered! it's really hard work but i am enjoying it.
as for the animals, well, i haven't seen a great deal really. i've heard loads of birds calling, but only seen a few actually in the trees - the vast majortiy of the birds i've seen have been in the mist netting traps, and the same with lizards and frogs. i've only seen one or two animals just being wild... but i've seen 2 or 3 snakes though, but still that doesn't seem that many considering how long i've been here.
We are on a privately owned reserve, which is what a lot of the amazon rainforest actually is (i assumed it was a national park) but no, it{s owned by a charity/company. this company (Yachana) has our reserve, where GVI do their stuff, plus there is an ecotourist lodge, and there is a school / technical college partner, where indigineous kids from poor families can get a propeor education, learn about the importance of their rainforest, and get trained in a trade such as ecotourism, and then get jobs which will help protect the rainforest. this is becasue local families own land, which is part of the amazon rainforest, and becasue they own it, they often use the land for farming, felling trees and destroying habitat in hte process, so it makes sense to teach the children of these families taht their land - their rainforest - is worth more to the planet (and them) in its natural state, than if it is farmed. that knowledge, and training the children for another trade other tahn farming, is probably the best way to save the rainforest.
so a big part of the project is to work in conjunction iwth the school, where 3 or 4 students a month come over to our bit of the reserve to learn english and do waht we do, and we also visit local schools and teach them english. i did this last week, and it was hard work but good fun. the kids were aged between 6 and 8, and me and anotehr girl, Jane, who loathes and despises children and really did not want to teach them, had to teach them classroom objects and prepositions - the book is on the table. this was pretty daunting, as they all speak Spanish or Quichua as their first language, and don't know much english, and we had to go in for an hour, maintain control, and get them to learn stuff. like all kids, they were boistrous, had really short atention spans, and wanted to play the running around games rather than writing sentences! but they loved high fives, and we played loads of games with them. we have also gone to another small community on starudays to introduce the kids - who are left by themselves all day, ranging in age from babies to 10 years ish - to teach them a bit of english to build bridges with the communities and keep then out of trouble for a bit. it's quite scary to teach children who know literally no english - this was their first lesson, and we taught them to say hello, how are you, i'm fine, whathn's your name, my name is, plus 6 animals they'll see around them. but it's good to discover the international language of things like skipping, football, frisbee, tickling, chasing, drawing in the sand, piggy backs, and they LOVED people's digital cameras, and would take them off you and they took over 300 photos on Tim's camera, i think!
So overall it's good so far. i do have a few gripes, but they are outweighed by the fun of it all. We are on our way to Hector's Island today, and have stopped in a town called Coca before we get the canoe over to his island, where there are monkeys, and all kinds of cool animals which we will see.
Some of my favourite moments so far:
- Catherine eating a whole bowl of chilli sauce for a dare/bet
- Spanglishing with the Ecuadorians all the time, and talking to Galo about chocolate and Jiu Jitsu
- Going on Sat Camp, where we slept out in jungle hammocks and ate baked potatoes
- seeing birds and other animals up close
- me biting people, and having Ella, Laura nd Hayley call me "the evil one"
- wathicng the same dreadful "hi, my name is your name, i'm an emergency first responder, may i help you?" videos i've already seen in CR!
- macheteing new paths and scrambling up muddy hillsides
- the night walk where we ended up wading in water up to our necks, with our backpacks held over our heads!
- the game nights, like when we had to make things out of 10 random objects, and i did a pass the parcel with forfeits!
- teaching the kids and having fun with them
- Ella going crazy and doiung running commentaires on card games
- knowing loads of bird calls
- lying in "my" yellow hammock all the time in the comedor
- hanging out with fun people :o)
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