Wildlife Rescue Center & Cayman Spotting

Later on our second day in the Amazon, we walked through the forest to visit the Taricaya Conservation Research Reserve and its wildlife rescue center.

Taricaya is a private entity, not government funded, and relies solely on grants and donations to carry out its work of rescuing, rehabilitating and releasing animals that have been poached, or orphaned, or in one case, kept in cruel conditions in a circus. We met the founder of this organization, Fernando. He is passionate about conserving the flora and fauna of the rainforest, and one of his many projects is to teach the local people how to plant more sustainable farms. He said they tend to plant bananas, which are easy to grow, but exhaust the soil after 4-5 years. He’s working on getting them to plant mahogany trees among the bananas so they have a source of quick income from the fruit, and a more long-term crop when the bananas stop producing.

Like everything else, Taricaya has been affected by the pandemic because they rely heavily upon volunteers. When the world shut down, most volunteers had to leave and no new helpers could come in. Several of the research projects had to go on hiatus because of lack of volunteers. They have had to scale back their turtle rescue project, where volunteers collected turtle eggs from the riverbank beach before poachers came to collect and sell them. Taricaya workers built artificial beaches in boxes at the center and dug the eggs into the sand to incubate. When the turtles hatch, they are gathered up to be returned to the same beach where they were initially laid. We watched a short video of the turtle release, and as soon as they were out of their tubs, they ran right to the river. Our photos show just some of the variety of animals that have been rescued and will eventually be released.

Some of the birds weren’t rescues, they were just on the property. One in particular that we hear all the time is the oropendula bird. It has a funny almost hiccuping call, and it tips its whole body like a pendulum. The ‘oro’ is because of its yellow wings. Check out our short video.

Later that day, after dark, we went out on the boat to see if we could spot caymans (alligator relative). We saw several, but usually they swam away from our flashlights pretty quickly. The one in our photo posed nicely for us.Read more