Photographing wildlife

I've finally got around to uploading some of my photos from my Brazil trip this summer to Flickr. I've always admired wildlife photographers, but this year in particular, I'm in awe of them. It's incredibly difficult to get good shots of animals: even if the animals in question are not particularly shy, they are either moving too fast (how inconsiderate of them) or sitting in the least well-lit spot in any particular landscape.

I had some great opportunities to take photos of some wonderful animals this year, but I still managed to blow it much of the time. I could try to blame the fact that I've got a compact camera with a not very long lens, but the truth is that I just need to be a better photographer. If I got the animal still and in the right place, I managed to forget to set the aperture or ISO appropriately. If I had everything set up perfectly, the animal moved off at the last minute, just before the shot.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy the photos, flawed though they are!

The River: Day

I stand on the wooden pontoon, looking at the river. I am on my own now, and everything is quiet and still except the river itself. The fast, relentless current makes you feel dizzy if you focus your gaze for too long at one spot. I'm determined to have a swim, but I know that it's going to be a challenge to fight the current. The pontoon creaks as I shift my weight, its boards bleached silver-grey by heat, rain and relentless sun.

I am wearing my swimming costume under my clothes, so I strip off quickly before I can chicken out, and walk to the upstream end of the pontoon. From this position, I'll have the easy downstream swim to get accustomed to the water, while still being able to grab the boards for safety. I jump in.

Cold. Breathing in, and in and in, as every cell in my body seems to try to withdraw itself simultaneously from the shock of the cold water. Every molecule of me is alive and everything is suddenly extraordinarily vivid. And... out. Finally, I manage an exhalation, and find to my surprise that the temperature is quite pleasant — brisk, but enjoyable.

I start to swim breast-stroke down stream, parallel to the pontoon. Swimming downstream is absurdly easy in this current. I feel like an otter, a dolphin, a river goddess. Everything is natural and easy. With my eyes near the surface of the water, I feel part of the river, rather than an observer of it. The air is heavy with the smell of the river: a ripe, green, damp, benignly-rotting scent like sweet compost, overlaid with the heady fragrance of jasmine from the plants on the opposite bank. The sound of my breath is amplified by the surface of the water, so that I feel as if I'm wearing a space helmet, and my world feels pleasantly contracted and intimate. I enjoy the contrast of the warm sun on my back and face and the cool water touching the rest of my body. The opaque, caramel coloured water conceals everything within it, but I'm absurdly comforted by not being able to see the many piranhas and caiman that I know are in this stretch of water. If I can't see them, I can let myself believe that they aren't there.

I've reached the end of the pier, and I hang on to the boards of the pontoon with one hand while letting my body unfurl in the current like a blade of grass dipping in the river from the bank. It's time to try the upstream swim. I take deep breaths and prepare to fight as soon as I let go of the pontoon. All trace of the river goddess has been washed away. Now I am swimming as hard and fast as I can just to stay in place, and I get a slight tinge of panic, but I am determined to win this battle. I begin to get the measure of the river, and make painful, slow progress up the pontoon, swimming harder than I've ever swum because the river never stops or slows. At last, I reach the end and grab for the boards, pulling myself in towards this man-made place of safety.

I'm breathing very hard, as if I've been trying to outrun a predator, and it's not at all goddess, otter or dolphin-like, or even very dignified. But I feel alive, supremely happy and heady with achievement. I make a few more laps of the length of the pontoon, exchanging my river goddess persona for my small, squeaky prey item persona at every turn.

Soon, I'm too tired to hold my own in the water, so I move to the pontoon to get out. I find the lowest part, which still appears to loom above me, intimidatingly high. I try to kick my legs hard and propel my body skywards, supported by my arms, but my upper body strength is puny, and the current is sweeping my legs sideways. Perhaps legs first would be easier? I hook one leg on to the flat surface of the pontoon and endeavour to haul the rest of my body after it, but it is hopeless and I get a fit of giggles imagining what an odd spectacle this would present to anyone watching from the bank. Time for Plan C.

I pull myself along to one of the wooden poles holding the navigation lights. I figure that if I grab hold of the vertical pole, then try to hook the lip of one of the big plastic drums which support the floating structure with my big toe, I might just get enough purchase to pull myself out of the water. It feels nearly impossible, and at one point I fear that I am going to have to explain in my pathetic Portuguese how I have broken their navigation lights, but eventually I flop wetly on to the deck like a newborn, panting and grimy with dirt and rust and relief.

I sit on my towel on the deck, feeling the sun dry my skin and enjoying the residual smell of river that lingers on it: distilled and finally still.

Wild swimming

One of the great treats of going to Brazil is a trip by boat to swim in the river. We find a nice spot with a sandy river beach, ignore the resident caiman, and pile in to the caramel coloured water. The water isn't cold, exactly, but it feels cool after the roasting heat of the sun. I love the tropics, but don't care for the heat very much, so I value any opportunity to get cool. The current is surprisingly strong, so you can use the river like a natural, water-treadmill. You thrash away as hard as you can, then find that you've made barely any progress relative to the bank, but when you've swum a little way, you can let yourself drift back, to start again.

The visibility under the water is very low, which is slightly unnerving. We know for sure that there are a lot of piranhas in the water, and every now and again you get a little, gentle nibble on a limb or your back, which keeps you on your toes. The reputation of piranhas is much more ferocious than they are (for a start, many species are not carnivorous), and it's quite safe as long as you don't have any open wounds. Similarly, the caiman just keep out of your way.

I know that it's not an efficient stroke, but I think that breaststroke is wonderful for wild swimming. You can see where you are going and hear all the bird calls bouncing off the water. As you look ahead, your sweeping hands slice the calm, virgin water cleanly, making you feel as if you're the first person ever to swim in the water. Even if you're swimming with others, you can point yourself towards a bit of open water and it's just you, your hands and the river. Bliss.

Snakes on the Plains

Watching wildlife is often the outcome of random encounters, and your luck never seems proportional to the time and effort you put in. Sometimes you lie silently on your belly on a freezing moor at dawn for hours and don't see so much as a rabbit, but at other times, you stroll along whistling and almost trip over a rare and wonderful animal. We were quite fortunate on this trip and had a lot of the latter kinds of experiences, including seeing not one, but two, whole anacondas.

Let's get one thing straight from the start: it's not like in the film. They don't suddenly lunge up out of the water and consume a boat and its occupants. They are fairly shy, and tend to lay low, quietly suffocating and swallowing smallish animals in private and out of the gaze of curious tourists. They also don't need to eat very often, so catching them in the act is even less likely.

We saw anaconda 1 on a horse ride. We were gaily wandering through a shallow lake on horseback, when one of the guides jumped off his horse, and started excitedly poking about in the rushes. He'd seen an anaconda which was in the process of constricting around a caiman and eating it. You might think that jumping into the water next to a snake big enough to swallow a medium sized caiman is a bad idea, but doing so while it's feeding on a medium sized caiman is probably as good a time as any, because the snake is actually rather busy. That was exciting.

The location of anaconda 2 was given away by some jacanas (big-footed water birds, similar to coots or moorhens). They were going crazy with alarm calls, hovering over a particular patch of water and looking very nervous indeed. When we looked through the weeds at the spot they were troubled by, we saw a lithe, yellow, spotted body slipping through the water. We were out of the water this time on a bridge, but one of the guides -- in his enthusiasm to show people wildlife at as close quarters as possible (with just a touch of wanting to impress the laydees) -- waded carefully in and grabbed the snake's head, hauling all 2.5 m of it out on to the bridge for us to hold.

I really prefer it when people leave wild animals alone, even if that means you don't get such a good view. Better a brief glimpse of a wild animal behaving naturally than a long look at one which would really like to go and hide in the water, thank you very much. However, there are times when you can't get a real impression of the physicality of an animal without seeing it up close and touching it. The warm, dry skin of the snake was beautiful, and the incredible smooth power of its muscles as it gripped our hands and arms was something that just looking at it wouldn't have conveyed. The guy put it back in the water gently, then backed away carefully. They may not rear up out of the water to attack you, but they do command a certain respect.

5.30 am

(Tuesday 19th August, 5.30am, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil)

It's 5.30am and the sun is just beginning to colour the eastern horizon a delicate peach, shading to deep indigo at the zenith. The river is very still in the silver half light, and a veil of mist hovers just above the surface of the water. A cool, light breeze drifts shreds of mist, like smoke, towards me, as I stand on the boardwalk watching. On three sides, groups of chaco chachalacas¹ strike up their raucous song, like a drunken military tattoo performed entirely on amplified kazoos, and backed occasionally by a howler monkey chorus. In the brief breaks between chaco sets, I can hear the various whistles, purrs and mews of other birds against the earth-shaking three-note bass growls of caiman the wildlife starts its day. The dawn here is often peaceful, but seldom quiet.

In the west, the full moon is still high, and as the sun rises, the cold, silver moon-shadows are gradually erased and replaced with the deep, warm sun-shadows. Dawn happens fast here: as I watch, the sun hauls itself above the horizon, bloodily dripping and setting fire to the landscape. Another day begins.

¹ They can be heard 2 km away, so you can imagine that when you're standing right next to them (or vice-versa), conversation is impossible, and earplugs are advisable. I once had to break off a conversation with my colleague because of noisy chacos above us. It's no use shouting at them, either (I've tried) -- you just have to wait until they're finished. ↑

Landed

I'm back in the UK after three weeks in Brazil. It was a good trip: the students worked hard and enjoyed themselves, we saw a lot of interesting animals, and my colleague and I made good progress on a grant application. However, it's a long time to be away from Mr. Bsag, and it's very nice to be home. When I got back from the airport yesterday and sat down on the sofa with him, cup of tea in hand, I was more content and happy than I've been for some time.

One of the real killers with the trip is the travel. Brazil is a fantastic country, but it's also very, very big. Our return journey took 36 hours in total, involving a 5 hour minibus journey and 4 separate flights. We also had a fair bit of hassle with the flights this time, though thankfully we didn't miss any of them. I don't want to get on another plane for a few months, I think!

In my absence, Mr. Bsag has been a whirlwind of productive activity. As well as making a lot of prints, he had arranged for an ugly conifer to be taken down in our garden, got the loft insulated, and even re-painted the hall, stairwell, landing, and the kitchen. It makes me think that I'm slowing him down, but I don't think either of us could keep up the pace we set when we're apart and trying to distract ourselves with activity.

Off to Brazil again

It's that time of year again when and colleague and I take a group of students to Brazil for a field course. I'm off on Monday, leaving -- with great reluctance -- Mr. Bsag and Cleo to fend for themselves for three weeks. We're in the middle of nowhere, so it's very unlikely that I'll be able to post anyting to the blog while I'm away. As usual, I had intended to make some posts in advance to be published during my absence, but as usual, I haven't had time. No doubt you'll all be busy enjoying the nice weather and/or the Olympics, so I doubt anyone will notice

Brazil is a gorgeous country and we're surrounded by wonderful wildlife, but it's very intense, hard work, and the heat gets to me after a while. I love the tropics, but I'd like them better if they were a bit cooler! I watched the first episode of Lost Land of the Jaguar this week, and even though the expedition featured is in Guyana, not Brazil, we see many of the same species. I felt slightly smug when they went to great lengths to film giant otters in their totally remote location, when we saw them from a boat about 5 minutes from our hotel. Two years ago, a couple staying at the hotel even saw a jaguar while they were on a boat trip early in the morning. It was sunning itself on the bank, and they got some stunning photographs, which made us wildly jealous.

The area we stay in may not have the same level of biodiversity as the area the team visited in Guyana or be as pristine, but we're very lucky to see so much wildlife.

Have a good August everyone, and I'll post about my adventures in about 3 weeks time, bearing (no doubt) the scars of heat rash and numerous insect bites.

Dawn to dusk

Our working day, while we were in Brazil, was dawn to dusk -- about 5.30 am to 6 pm. We were up and out by 5.15 am, watching the light rush over the landscape, as it tends to do in the tropics (no languid, leisurely dawns there), then we headed to breakfast at about 6.30 am, feeling like we'd already accomplished something. Then there was the relatively cool, productive period until about 11 am, an agonising hour when our stomachs rumbled incessantly for lunch, followed by the flattening, oppressive heat of the early afternoon until about 3 pm. The final stretch from 3-6 pm was pleasant, gradually cooling, and with a lovely golden light cast on everything.

I mention this because I found it quite a pleasant way to work. There's something just right about timing your working day to match the available light. You get a feeling of continuity as you watch the bats (which you saw leaving their roosts at the end of the previous day) returning from their night time foraging, and the cormorants and herons (which you saw coming back to their roosting trees the previous evening) leaving to start their day. Their activity synchronises with your activity, and after a bit of adjustment to the early start, you find that it sits very comfortably with the natural changes in your energy levels.

Of course, if you get up at 5 am, you have to go to bed at about 9 pm at the latest (though we rarely lasted past 8.30 pm), so it somewhat curtails your social life. And in temperate latitudes, your working day would oscillate wildly between unworkably short in winter, to exhaustingly long in mid-summer. Of course, this is how people used to work when their calendar was driven by the agricultural year, and artificial light was expensive and hard to come by. Explaining to your boss that you are late to work because it isn't yet light is going to sound like the lamest of excuses now. But if I had more freedom to schedule my own day, I'd like to follow the periodicity of the natural day length more closely -- I think that I'd have a lot more energy to spare.

Incubation

It seems that I may have brought a little stowaway back with me from Brazil. A couple of weeks into the trip, I noticed that I had a small lump on the bottom of my left foot, between my big toe and second toe. That wasn't very surprising, because I am -- as I have said before -- a mosquito magnet, and had gathered a impressive collection of bites by that time. However, this one seemed a bit different.

[Squeamish readers, please look away now.]

{Read more...}

Travel disconnects the senses

I'm back. At least, I think I am. Brazil is such a huge country, and so far away from the UK that travelling from the centre of Brazil feels like an expedition in itself. I started back on Saturday, at 3pm local time, and didn't get back to Birmingham until 1pm on Monday. There was the 20 hour bus ride, the hours of waiting at Sao Paulo airport, the 11 hour flight followed by another 1 hour 40 minute flight, and finally the taxi ride home.

Perhaps it was mostly tiredness and jet-lag, but I found that my senses got disconnected from one another. Like a group of tired children, they straggled along, getting out of synchronisation with one another. When I woke on the bus, sound roared in suddenly like a window opened on raging surf before sight and touch worked out where I was. On the flight, I realised that I had been staring at the back of the seat in front of me for several minutes after waking, seeing it, but not being aware of sound, touch or smell, or of thinking consciously about anything.

Bits of me kept getting left behind. I felt wide awake on the last part of my flight, then an intense, irresistible sleepiness ambushed me suddenly as we landed. Part of the problem, I think, is that long distance travel is done using stolen time, and there's eventually a price to pay for that petty crime. On the plane, it's night, but if you lift the window blinds slightly, you see fierce, shocking sunlight piling up against the glass, trying to burst the little bubble of time created by inter-continental flight. It finds you in the end.

I enjoy taking off. I like the burning roar of the engines, feeling the hand of acceleration pushing you firmly in the chest, pinning you to your seat. I like the sudden, gentle lurch as the wheels leave the ground, when you are falling and being lifted at the same time.

But it's all disconnection, and I'm glad to be back with familiarity, slowly synchronising my senses again and re-setting my clock. I seem to be more or less all here.

Leaving again

It's that time of year again when I have to pack my bags to go to Brazil for three weeks to teach a course. As usual, I haven't got nearly as much organised before my departure as I'd hoped. I had planned to write a few articles to forward post here, but -- well -- that didn't happen. Frankly, I'm amazed that I seem to have got things organised for the trip, but I'm paranoid that I've forgotten something vital. It all seems a bit too easy...

One thing that I set up before the trip last year, which has been immensely useful this year, is a kind of master packing list. I wrote a detailed list in OmniOutliner of everything I took (separated into checked baggage and hand baggage). Since I know that I travelled comfortably with those items last year, I can be fairly confident that if I pack those things again, all will be well. As with GTD, getting things out of your mind and into a 'trusted system' is a huge help. It basically stops you sitting bolt upright in bed at 3am and yelling "Torch!", startling your partner in the process.

I leave on Sunday, and while Brazil will be -- I am sure -- as beautiful and wildlife-packed as usual, it's going to be a tough three weeks. I'm also going to miss Mr. Bsag (and Cleo) like blazes - I'm hoping they'll look after one another while I'm gone, but I'll have to make do with a picture of both of them on my phone. It's our seventh¹ wedding anniversary while I'm away, so we're having a substitute celebration on Saturday. Roll on mid-September!

In the meantime, if something goes awry with the site in my absence, or gets swamped by spammers, I'm afraid that I won't even know about it, still less do anything about it.

¹ Seven years! Shouldn't we be itching, or something? ↑

The scuttling under doors spider

Alan's recent post about a crab spider reminded me that I never followed up on my promise to talk about Brazilian giant flattened spiders. True, I haven't exactly been deafened by people wanting to hear the story, but since when did I write things that other people wanted to read? Despite the earlier billing, this spider wasn't exactly giant, but it was big by the standards of British spiders. I should also say that, while I'm generally not frightened of spiders, invertebrates aren't really my thing, and I don't like spiders of unknown species and biting propensity creeping up on me¹.

My colleague and I had been working quietly on the balcony of the hotel room, when we suddenly saw this big, flat, grey, ghost-like spider. Our first instincts were solidly scientific -- we took the photograph you see above, complete with carefully placed binoculars for scale (the diameter of the binocular is about 4cm). This was swiftly followed by a very non-scientific, big-girl's-blouse moment when we flicked it gently but firmly off the balcony with a long ruler.

A few hours later, I turned my head slightly and saw the same species of spider (perhaps even the same individual, back for revenge!) a few centimetres behind my head, sitting on the wall of the chalet in the perfect position to hop onto my neck. Eeek. I didn't scream, but I did move away from the wall fairly sharply. We stood at a safe distance and looked at the spider, speculating about its unusual flattened body plan, and coming to the unwelcome conclusion that it was perfectly adapted for slipping underneath closed doors. There followed a lot of activity in which ring binders, books and other stacks of paper where jammed into the gap under the closed door to form a spider exclusion zone. I spent the rest of the evening looking nervously over my shoulder at the spider on the wall, not sure whether I would be more relieved to find it still there (where I could see it), or gone to an unknown location.

Now that the memory is several months old -- and the spider itself is safely several thousand kilometres away -- I'd quite like to know what species it is, and whether I was worrying about nothing.

¹ Before anyone else points this out, yes, I do know that very few spiders will bite a human unless provoked or in imminent danger of death. It's just that there's something about a big, unfamiliar spider that tends to override this knowledge in a primeval way. ↑

Rain

[I meant to write about this experience in Brazil a while back but forgot, and it just came back to me again the other day.]

The heat and humidity are oppressive. I feel smothered by a thick, damp blanket, pressed to the earth by a heavy, enclosing hand. It's too hot to move or even breathe, and the flat, grey clouds muffle any breeze. Even thought slows as I sit and stare.

Suddenly, there's a basso rumble, felt more than heard. Surely it can't be thunder? Then another low drum roll, closer now, and bringing with it a breath of wind like an exhalation, stirring the leaves. I stand up, willing the storm closer, knowing now why people used to dance to bring the rains. Come here, Storm, don't pass us by. The pressure is immense as the storm builds, the wind lifting and tossing the tops of trees, everything is dancing wordlessly now---Rain, come.

The wind stops abruptly and the giant's hand is lifted. Fat, ripe, juicy raindrops explode on hot parched skin, detonating shivers of pleasure, waves of delicious coolness. I stand in the open, face turned to the sky, eyes closed, smiling, opening like a flower.

Page 1 of 1 pages