At Play in the Jungles of the Lord

Part I – Prologue

By Major L. Boddicker

Amazon's jungle is rarely quiet. Birds, frogs, and insects keep the sounds flowing in an endless stream. Three levels of trees and plants reach toward the sun and filter its rays to the ground. The only breaks in this carpet of vegetation for tens of thousands of square miles are the rivers, streams, and mudslides. A description of the atmosphere is heavy, dark, humid, and eerie. It oozes the smells, sounds, and scenes of the primitive world, the way things were.

José Tenteyo Pereyra, A Machiguenga Indian, and I were slowly wading down a sparkling stream that wound through a dense bamboo and tropical hardwood forest. I was surveying large mammals for the Smithsonian Institution and intently looking for tracks and sign of jungle mammals along the banks.

José looked up suddenly into the jungle, then back at me, and then nodded at a dark spot in the jungle between the trees and bamboo. Somebody, unseen, was there watching us. I took a few more steps and climbed out on a sandbar. Looking down in the sand, I saw human track made a few minutes before with sand caving into it as the water began to erase it. I looked up again. José was nervous. The bare human footprint was small, a size 6 or 7.

José motioned for us to head back to the San Martin oilrig camp as dinnertime and dark were approaching. I signaled him to proceed down the stream for 15 more minutes. He was not happy about that, but turned around, and we continued down stream.

We slowly waded another 75 yards and came around a sharp bend in the stream. Again, fresh human tracks in the sand and on the bank were a sign. José looked at it, and his face grew tense. The muscles and his jaws tightened, and he looked at me with a “Hey, Lone Ranger, I'm gettin' out of here” look. He was not going any further. The sign was made by scooping sand and mud onto the bank, smoothing it out, and then making a design with the fingers in the mud. The meaning was clear and deadly serious. It was made with authority. The predominant marks directed us back toward camp. It said, “Go no further.”

I looked up into the jungle, smiled, took off my hat, and made a bow, and then we turned around and slowly worked our way back to camp. Was I afraid? Yes!

In February 1997, I received a call from an old friend, Francisco Dallmeier, who is director of the Smithsonian Institution's Biodiversity Program. Francisco was a student at Colorado State University just before I resigned in 1984. He is a great friend and professional of the highest caliber. Pancho (his nickname) was from Venezuela and did his Ph.D. work on South American waterfowl. I suggested that he should attend the Furtaker of America's Trappers College in 1982 at Pingree Park, Colorado, for a great background in trapping, and to meet the people who really make America run. He really enjoyed it and was impressed by the woodcraft of trappers.

The reason for his telephone call to me was he needed someone to survey large mammals in the Amazon Jungle of Peru around drilling rigs that were exploring for natural gas. The Urubamba River is one of the last undeveloped and exploited areas on earth because it is in a real hard place to get to. On Peruvian maps, the region is called a “Reserve for Nomadic Tribes.” The Indians do not appreciate outsiders at all and work hard to avoid contact with them. They maintain, for all practical purposes, the old ways of life, living off the land, taking everything they need from it. In the past, these Indians have had bad experiences with outsiders ranging from raids to capture slaves, cheating in trade, and introducing European diseases. As a result, they have decided they can get along without us.

About 12 years ago, a cook at an exploration rig in the region went for a walk in the jungle and was killed for his trespassing. Recent efforts to work in the area have included contact with the Indian tribes and efforts to pay them and help them in return for peaceful gas and oil exploration.

Shell Oil Company had contacted the Smithsonian to see if the Smithsonian could develop a biological diversity monitoring program for Shell's exploration. “Biological diversity monitoring” basically is finding and identifying the plants and creatures at a location, attempting to count them, then recount them over time to see if the exploration effort is causing a change in the populations of those plants and animals. The project was quite ambitious and without a “protocol” to follow. So, part of the job was to develop the methods needed to accomplish the monitoring goals.

Why did Pancho call me? I guess he figured I could successfully accomplish the work. My guess is that I was not the first person he called. It is difficult to find experts who can get free for months at a time, to drop their regular jobs and businesses and go into the steaming jungles of the primitive Amazon. The person has to be physically able to handle the work, heat, insects, diseases, and have the ability and experience to find large mammals, rabbit size and up. That is not easy, particularly in the jungle. The vegetation is so thick that sometimes it is difficult to see your feet. To find large mammals takes all of the hunting and trapping skills one can muster. Then, all of the work has to be documented, organized, and written into a report so someone else can take and repeat the techniques and carry on.

To complicate the survey further, no firearms and very restricted trapping was allowed. That leaves only finding and identifying sign, direct observation, and photography as methods of verifying large mammal presence. Some mammalogists do not want to work under those kinds of restrictions, and I do not blame them. Those rules tie the researchers' hands so a difficult job becomes even more difficult.

To scientifically verify a large mammal is present, a study skin deposited in a museum is required. All the rest of the mammal evidence is second rate. Part of our task was to develop a system of verification that could be good enough to pass the scientific requirements of the mammalogy profession without the dead animal.

I made it clear to Pancho that it had been 1966 since I had done any formal mammalogy work, and I have never gotten proficient on a computer. So, with those limitations, if Smithsonian wanted me, I would go.

Biodiversity monitoring, game surveys, and population monitoring are very difficult even in the USA where we have the money and expertise, equipment, and visibility. In Peru, all we were going to have was our feet, senses, a pencil, notebook, camera, and boots.

Pancho asked me if I would do it. As usual, I said yes, instantly, without much contemplation. I was 55 years old, fat, and with zero experience in the jungle. For me to take on such a project was not logical, in fact, it was a rather dumb idea; however, it is exactly the kind of adventure I love to do.

When someone calls me a reprobate, a low-down animal killer, stubborn, unreasonable, gold-plated S.O.B., frankly I have no argument with that description. In fact, they are good observers. So? Live with it. I have worked damned hard to earn my reputation. Quoting Ludy Sheda, the famous Iowa trapping philosopher, “What is important is to have a reputation. If it's good, that's okay; if it's bad, that's okay too.” When you hire me, I get the job done the best I can do it.

I had two months to get the immunizations I needed for yellow fever, hepatitis A & B, DPT shot, polio vaccine, flu shot, tetanus, and rabies. According to the Communicable Disease Center, the area has every disease known to man, including both kinds of drug-resistant malaria. In addition, there are many diseases, viruses in particular, that are new to man.

I speak no Spanish whatever beyond a few words off a Mexican restaurant menu.

When I stepped off the airplane at the Lima, Peru airport, a friendly gent who spoke fluent Spanish, no English, met me. He managed to get me on a smaller plane headed to Nuevo Mundo, the Shell Oil Company staging camp.

The flight over the Andes Mountains was bumpy, and the scenery was incredible. The Andes Mountains go up almost two more miles, 10,000 feet higher (to 24,000 feet), than Colorado's highest mountains (14,000 feet). Looking down, any sign of people was few and far between. I could see absolutely no disastrous rainforest cutting we hear so much about.

When we cleared the mountains, the Amazon jungle began as very rugged foothills, dropping quickly into an endless carpet of jungle stretching east for 3500+ miles. The jungle is broken only by many rivers and streams and an occasional mudslide. Much of the region we were to be working in was covered with several kinds of bamboo, a huge grass. Walking around in the bamboo was similar to the kids walking in the grass in the movie, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

In the higher elevations and dark sides of the mountains, the bamboo stopped and a canopy of beautiful hardwoods towered hundreds of feet above us. Three levels of vegetation crowded out the light to the forest floor making the general atmosphere dark, wet, and buggy.

The temperatures during the tropical winter or dry season are surprisingly cool, rarely getting above 90°F. Under the canopy along the waterways, the temperature was very comfortable. Bird life, amphibians, reptiles, and insects constantly moved through the vegetation making various warning and territorial calls.

There are lots of poisonous creatures in the Amazon Jungle, including coral snakes, fer-de-lance, bushmasters (rattleless rattlesnakes), and several smaller Nothrix species related to rattlesnakes, poison toads, spiders, and wasps. More dangerous are the insect and protozoan teams of diseases. Malaria is common, so are GI-tract ameba, systemic ameba, leishmaniasis, filariasis, jungle rot (a fungus mold that eats your flesh), bot flies, screw worm maggots, and sundry bacterial infections and exotic viruses like yellow fever, Ebola, and rhino viruses. The monkeys have diseases transmissible to man. A person can eat, drink, or breathe these viruses and diseases or get them from insect bites.

Swimming naked in the rivers is not a good idea either. They have a fish there that lives by swimming up the orifices (holes) in other fish. This little “orifice fish” then spreads its pectoral fins to hook in and lives on the fluids of its host. This fish makes errors of judgment and swims into human orifices of unsuspecting swimmers. The discomfort is intense, whichever hole it gets into. One can only imagine it. Ever been pricked by a bullhead fin? It has to be cut out or removed with a special tool. Guess how that feels!

There is an ameba, a shapeless gob of protoplasm, which can penetrate the skin and grow in a human's bloodstream. It will break out into pustules and create havoc in the organs, making one sick. One roughneck on a rig crew went home blind in one eye from ameba that died between his retina and the optic nerve in his eye.

Leshmaniasis is a wound that never heals. It is injected into a person by a sand-fly and usually causes an open sore on the skin. That parasite is related to syphilis (a spirochete) and is exceedingly tough to treat. The wound does not heal without treatment, but simply gets larger and uglier. It may go systemic and inhabit the body where the bug settles in the cartilage tissue of the nose and ears, causing them to melt away. Nasty. To get rid of it, the doctor gives you three choices: treat you with arsenic, antimony, or it eats you. Arsenic and antimony are poisonous to you, and particularly attack the kidneys and liver. You are poisoned until you almost die. At that point, leshmaniasis dies first, just before you do. Three people left the rigs infected with leshmaniasis while I was working there. There are many reasons why white men have not populated the Amazon region. Tropical diseases rank high among them.

Nuevo Mundo had been a small Mechiguenga Indian village on the banks of the Urubamba River. The Urubamba River is a major tributary to the Amazon. Shell Oil Company had negotiated the rights from the Peruvian government and Mechiguenga Indians to build a staging area complex and airfield at Nuevo Mundo.

The complex was nicely organized with typical small portable buildings housing the men, materials, and machinery to keep a small city running. The airstrip was large and could accommodate large cargo aircraft.

I checked in at the security office and was directed to a dining hall for lunch and to await the helicopter ride to San Martin. There were several other scientists waiting there—Peruvians who spoke little, if any, English. We had a nice lunch and dozed wherever we could find a spot and waited. The day was cloudless, hot, and humid.

A huge black Chinook helicopter was hauling loads about one per hour ($10,000 per hour) to the exploration sites from Nuevo Mundo. The Chinook had been Donald Trump's personal chopper. Imagine sending it to pick up Evana Trump from a shopping trip.

From Nuevo Mundo, we climbed into a helicopter and flew for 30 minutes over jungles and rivers to San Martin. From above, San Martin was a bare hilltop, cleared and leveled, being prepared for a drilling rig, setting in a sea of bamboo and trees.

The topography throughout the Urubamba region is very rough and severe. The dirt looked familiar—red, like the soils of Africa.

Many millions of years ago, all of the continents were one solid piece called Godwana Land. One huge river, the Congo River, ran from east to west, draining this enormous continent. Where the Congo dumped into the primeval ocean for hundreds of millions of years, a gigantic delta formed. The vegetation that collected there rotted and chemically changed to become oil, coal, and natural gas.

About 150–200 million years ago, the west side of Godwana Land broke loose and drifted west. This piece collided with another drifting plate and pushed up the Andes Mountains. This drifting continent which began with a dip to the west, tipped up on the west and began to tip to the east. The Congo River became the Amazon River. The old Congo Delta became the foothills on the east side of the Andes. This layer of ex-African mud and sand, fossils, and petroleum products goes down 6000 feet into the earth. The plates are still grinding together and pushing the Andes upward, inches per year. This causes extensive landslides. The soil is sedimentary and when exposed to rain, washes away quickly and turns to slime. The hills that form from the erosion are steep. The soil when wet is slimy, sticky goo that fights releasing anything stuck into it. When wet, this dirt is the gooiest slime I have ever seen.

Shell Oil Company, to its credit and as a result of environmentalist pressure, decided to manage its exploration as it would an offshore ocean exploration. Instead of building roads over this impossible terrain and conditions, all of the equipment, men, and goods were being flown in with Chinook and Huey helicopters. That means incredible expense and a serious danger factor.

During the flight to San Martin, we flew first to several other camps to drop off roughnecks who were changing shifts. Most of the labor was Peruvian Indians and mixed-bloods from Lima. They had black hair, dark eyes, and deep brown skin. Generally, they were smaller than an average American was.

The overhead was generally Caucasian whites from Europe and the USA. Shell Oil Company is a Dutch/British company headquartered in Amsterdam. It has worldwide operations in every niche and cranny wherever oil is found and gasoline or diesel fuel are sold.

Two impressive facts when an inexperienced person observes Shell’s gas exploration effort are that it costs one hell of a lot of money, and it is one enormous risk. Shell knows how to do it. The experience also gives a person who appreciates gasoline at the pump when he needs it to go coyote hunting, a feeling that oil production is in good hands.

The helicopter sat down at Cashiriari I and Armihuari I camps, which were in various stages of completion. A drilling rig was already set up and drilling at Armihuari. Lunch was a traditional cold potato with a green avocado sauce, chicken soup, and a ¼-piece of a roast chicken with several vegetables, which I did not recognize. After an hour at lunch and a rest, we lifted up in the Huey and flew to San Martin.

The San Martin camp was in the setup stage and was rough, but comfortable. We had beds, showers, toilets, and a dining hall. None of those were wonderful, but adequate.

My first food in Peru was a sandwich I ate at the Lima airport that created instant diarrhea. The result of that was a very strong loyalty to the thunderbox and toilet paper carefully stored in a plastic bag, within arm’s reach for immediate action.

A boardwalk connected all of the facilities to keep us from bogging down in the red mud. Millions of insects filled the air day and night, mostly termites and ants looking for a new place.

I was shown the tent I was to share with seven other scientists. All of the tents were on wooden platforms 18 inches off the ground. The bed was lumpy. I unpacked my gear and changed clothes. It was 3 p.m. There were three hours of daylight left, and I walked to the biodiversity lab (shack) to meet the rest of the crew and to get instructions.

Alfonso Alonso, the coordinator of the Urubamba project; José Santisteban, field manager; and Shana Udvardy, assistant field manager, offered points of orientation as well as they could. The project was new, all of the people were inexperienced at how to do it, and everything that was done was 500 miles from Lima, Peru, and 3500 miles from Miami, Florida. If you needed something, sorry, it is at least two weeks away.

The basic instructions were the following: “Go thee into the jungle and do a biodiversity monitoring survey of large mammals. You were hired to be the expert, so go be one.” So, with two hours of light left, 12 Sherman live-traps, 24 Victor rat-size snap traps, 24 Victor mouse traps, a rake, 12 types of Carman lures, and a faithful Indian sidekick named Federico Ramires Rios, I stepped off the boardwalk into the Amazon Jungle.

Near the Equator, days and nights are 12 hours long; there is no noticeable change in the amount of sunlight between the seasons. Then cap the forest floor with three levels of bushes and trees, and it is rather dark during the daylight. At night, with cloud cover, it is very dark, like you cannot see your hand in front of your face. When it gets dark, the lights just quickly go out. That encourages folks to be back in camp when the switch is flipped.

During the night, the bushmaster and fer-de-lance snakes hunt, and one does not want to be whacked by them. They are big pit vipers or rattlesnakes with no rattles. Six- to eight-foot long snakes are not unusual, so when they strike, it is on the thigh or body, not the foot or ankle. The amount of venom is large, and the stuff is toxic.

An ornithologist (bird man) from Florida, 7 or 8 years ago, was bit on the ankle about 80 miles from where San Martin is located. He was about a week from Lima and medical treatment. By the time they got him there, they told him they needed to take his leg off at the knee. He refused, so they flew him to Miami. By that time, they took his leg off at the hip.

Fortunately, we had snake anti-venom at the medical facility at each camp. Being very familiar with prairie rattlesnakes helped me avoid any close encounters with these snakes.

Federico was a great guy, friendly and very helpful. He could speak five languages, but no English, so we struggled.

I really did not have a clue as to what to do to survey large mammals in the jungle, so started out by setting up scent circles, 1-meter diameter circles of cleared and raked dirt, with Q-tips of Carman’s lures stuck in the middle of them. From camp to the creek to the north was about a half-mile. We put four scent-stations about every 100 yards. At each scent-station, we put one medium sized National live-trap, two rat traps, and two mouse traps.

For the startup, I was not sure whether or not I was supposed to survey small mammals as well. Fortunately, Sergio Solari, a mammalogist from the Museum of Natural History in Lima, was put in charge of that task. Surveying the large mammals turned out to be more than a full-time job.

By 5:45 p.m., dark was dropping quickly. Federico and I had set the traps and scent stations we had anticipated, so we started up the steep muddy slope to the camp, carefully picking our foot placement and viewing the bamboo overhead and beside us to spot snakes before they could hit us.

The Indians in the Amazon do not like to be out and about at night. Esté pelegroso (it is dangerous!).

The camp was full of workers, most of who looked at us as “environmentalist intruders” wasting Shell Oil Company’s money. Few of them could speak any English, so there was not much conversation. I just said hola, buenos dias, noches, tardes, gracias amigo, si, nada, and I worked hard at picking up a few other bits of Spanish to get me by like donde es le bãno?

Being unable to talk to these Indians and people was exceedingly frustrating, to the point of exasperation. Federico worked hard at learning some English, but he (like me) has had a shut-down of the language-learning brain cells.

We ate in rotation, with the Smithsonian crew being last. The set-up camp was rough and crude compared to the drilling camp and was run by a Peruvian company with Peruvian rules. By and large, Peruvians do not give a damn about some of the stuff that America is sensitive about. There was a clear understanding in the camp facilities of who was who. The bosses ate first and best, then the skilled workers and foreman, then the Indians, then us. The Indians basically ate separately and ate slightly different food, depending on the camp.

I cannot remember the first evening meal, but about 60% of the time it was some form of chicken. By that time, I was feeling the effects of jet lag, diarrhea, dehydration, and frustration at the language barrier.

Within a couple of days, several American ornithologists and bat specialists joined us. Within a week, there was a small group who spoke English and could help translate and make things happen.

Our Indian crew was from two tribes; the Mechiguenga was the tribe that inhabited the area around the rig sites. The Yaminahua's area was about 200 miles north. They made clear distinctions between themselves and historically had made war on each other. Now they get along, but occasionally kidnap women for wives and construct other mischief. They speak very different languages, but they can speak and understand both native languages and Spanish and Portuguese.

Without a better ability to understand Spanish or Indian dialects, there was not much chance to get to know much about these people. They seemed to be very intelligent and basically happy. They had a great sense of humor and were very inquisitive. Over three month’s time during May 1997 to April 1998, I worked with six of them, two Yaminhuas and four Mechiguengas. All of them caught on quickly to what I was doing and pitched in and helped a great deal.

Whenever I have struck out alone to do something or to go somewhere that is totally new, I have had to struggle with the uncertainties. It is called “edging up to the trough,” like the new pig in the pen. Some people make it a battle; some people just hold back and don’t try. I took my coaching from the coyote on that, so generally do fine in a short time. However, it is a lonely feeling. The first day at San Martin came to an end.

The bed was lumpy but felt great. I took some Pepto Bismol tablets, a long drink of water, plugged my ears with rubber hearing protectors, and went to sleep.

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