By Richard Munday, Alumni and Desk Officer for the Conservation Program in Peru

For nearly three years we have been trying to get our foot in the door – so to speak – with the community of Palma Real. Palma Real is a relatively new community, only about 100 years old really, which was set up with the work of Catholic priests that came to do missionary work in Peru and the Amazon.

The Indigenous people of the lower Madre de Dios region naturally lived in small groups with a few families in one place then a few more in another and so on with the main hub in one place, far away from large rivers and lakes. But when the priests came, the first thing they did was round-up all the locals and move them into two areas. One is called Palma Real (with around 300 people living there) which is located about one and a half hours further down river from the Taricaya reserve and one called Infierno, which is located about one hour from Puerto Maldonado itself and is accessible by road.

Volunteers arrive in Palma Real

Typical house in Palma Real

Over the years many NGOs have entered the community with good intentions but little foresight. One of them actually built a cement water tower and fitted tubing to a local fresh water creek, gave them a generator and water pump but failed to provide a daily budget for them to run it all so now it stands mainly unused. The early ones insisted that the community hold on to their native activities and try not to change at all whilst they were giving them western clothes, western food and many other habits that westerners have developed. So the community has developed a mentality of reliance.

Now as you all know this is not the philosophy of the Taricaya reserve. We help those who help themselves. So our first attempt to work with them failed as we were not insistent enough with them. In 2005 we planned to build a dam for them so they could use a water wheel to pump their water. All we asked is that they cut the wood for the structure. We gave them our chainsaw, gasoline and all the measurements. The chainsaw was returned a month later with no sign or news of any wood. So about six months ago we began trying again, this time with something a lot smaller in regards to work but that should have a huge visual impact and give them more confidence in us as well us in them.

So far our plans and negotiations are going very well, we have been speaking with the teachers of the community who seem to have a lot more power in the town (The community actually has a president who rules over the town but seems to be more of a puppet of the teachers) and have decided upon an interesting new idea. Palma Real has a really bad rubbish problem, with no collection system or a place to dump it, so most it goes on to the floor and is left there which you can imagine is a horrible sight. Using one of our donkeys and a specially designed cart we are fairly certain we can help them set up a system of rubbish collection and transport to an area away from the town and we have also managed to get the community to promise to cut the posts for the donkey enclosure and plant them as well as organise a “Community Day” where with the help of Taricaya volunteers, staff and hopefully most of the community we will clean the whole town of rubbish, so in one day they can see the huge difference a clean community can make.

The future of Palma Real

In fact all Taricaya will have to do is put the wire onto the posts, bring the donkey and spend a few hours explaining and showing the community what the donkey can do, which will be done via a variety of demonstrations.

This work will be started and should be completed early next month as there isn’t a huge amount of labour. Then we hope that they will see that we can provide sensible, long term solutions that cost them next to nothing and begin to trust us a lot more and begin putting more and more cooperation into our ideas. We will also begin to slowly start suggesting bigger projects, which as you can hopefully tell means we are potentially embarking on a major new route for Taricaya and hope to bring you some great news on this project soon.

Learn more about Tariaya and our Conservation Program in Peru HERE

By Richard Munday,

One of our ongoing projects for the last six months has been the GPS mapping of the entire reserve.

This project has been planned in three stages. Stage 1 was the complete mapping and marking of all the trails around the reserve, which meant walking around all the trails and stopping every 50M waiting for a GPS signal and then moving on to take the next point. Now as you can imagine, with about 30 KM of trails to mark we knew it would take a long time! But thankfully we had the help of Rike Becker, a student who is now in Argentina, who took charge of the entire project and managed to complete this stage for us.

Stage 2 was the marking of all the main structures of the reserve, platforms, buildings, bridges and then putting all the data into one spreadsheet so that we could make the computerized version of the map. Again this wasn’t a huge task, although we probably had about 1000 points in total and probably a lot more than that. We managed to have the basic map made up with about two weeks of work, the next stage of things was to link all the points together so that the trails were actually lines and not just dots, making sure each trail was coloured differently, adding special colour points for bridges, platforms and buildings and then adding trail names, the river, the creek, a compass, and the main key.

What a cool map!

Stage 3 which is still being planned out, is the identification and marking of key areas of botanical interest. In February we should have had several botanists planning to visit us, but due to the flood and the resulting high swamp levels, we decided it would be best to delay their arrival until we could use the forest properly. When the levels have dropped again, the botanists will be able to help us identify primary and secondary forest, swamp areas, dense forest, clear forest, even down to different types of trees, this again is going to be a pretty big task and will no doubt take a good few months to complete it. But once the work is done we will have a complete map, which we can use for many different things like navigation, identification of good sites for certain projects such as mist-netting and auto-camera sites, and even new observation points.

You can learn more about our other projects on our Conservation Program in Peru here

By Richard Munday

Only just in to the second month of 2008 and already Taricaya has had a little excitement but a major inconvenience.

On February 2nd The Reserva Ecologica Taricaya found itself going underwater. Now this has already happened before all the way back in 2002 but we still found it a huge shock and a big inconvenience, worrying about all the animals, how much deeper it was going to get and of course what to do with the volunteers was all flying through our minds when we realised what was going on…

Leaving Taricaya on Saturday morning, we saw that the waters were worryingly high, but didn’t think to much more of it having already made preparations for a minor flood like moving generators and all the electrical items to higher levels, making sure all the volunteers in lower rooms had moved their things to high shelves and making sure all the staff knew what needed to be done and where everything would be going if things got worse. We arrived in Puerto and with Fernando and Stuart both in Cusco it was left to me to take things under control in town with emails to check, making sure coordination’s were made for supplies for next week and two new volunteers to pick up that day, I found myself a little tied up to say the least!

With everything finished by about 3:40 Saturday afternoon, I headed back to Fernando’s house (where I stay in Puerto) and quickly found myself confronted with Maria Fernanda who had been checking the water levels at the port. Hearing from her that the water had risen another 50 cm I quickly got things moving to get a boat ready and head off to the lodge. But as we all know things in Peru don’t move quickly, it took us about two hours to get everything organised, from getting some of the volunteers down to the port to help us, finding all the staff possible and of course coordinating things with Fernando, Stuart and Willy.

Going down a fast rising river in the dark wasn’t really fun, but of course we managed it with no problems with thanks to Gigo and Sr Wicho (A carpenter of all people who has been doing a lot of work for us but has a lot of experience on rivers)

Arriving at the lodge we were glad to find that we had arrived in time. Although the waters were high, they were not high enough to be a serious problem; even our little Donkey house for Baby Rambito was still dry.

Panic over, we sat down and began coordination for the next days work, moving everything we could find to top rooms, with the water rising about 2cm an hour, we knew that by tomorrow night we would be deep under the water.

Over the course of the next 5 days the river rose to a maximum height of 1M (measured from a high point near the new kitchen – These measurements were taken so we had reference of what the river was doing) then gradually dropped back down to zero again…

The fun wasn’t over though as we had to clean up the mud that was left over, which was great fun! We used a huge water pump to blast the mud from buildings and then repairing all the damage that the waters had caused.

Thankfully no one was hurt over the course of this excitement but unfortunately we did loose one of our Blue and Yellow Macaws, who had fallen into the water during the night.

We are now back to normal work and life in Taricaya, in fact the flood at the start of the month seems like a crazy dream, here’s hoping that our next “El Nino” cycle (The weather system that causes global flux’s in weather) is a little more friendly…still we have another 5 years to prepare for that one!

A monthly update from the Taricaya Reserve and our Conservation Program in Peru

By Richard Munday

With the arrival of a group of vets from Lima, we quickly arranged a day in Puerto Maldonado for all the volunteers and most of the staff to help out at the local zoo with enclosure maintenance. We were doing any repairs, putting sawdust on the floors, and health checks of all the animals – checking for wounds, taking weights, checking diets and worming the animals.

We began as soon as we arrived in Puerto by transporting all the volunteers, vets and most of the staff to the zoo to let the staff there know that we had arrived. Then taking some of the volunteers in the truck we went to collect the sawdust from a local saw mill. Even the destruction of trees in the rainforest can have a small benefit for us. Sawdust is an important material in helping to keep the enclosures clean and tidy, without it the floors get muddy and fruit quickly becomes rotten, attracting many insects and parasites.

Volunteers with bags of sawdust

Whilst the sawdust group was busy, the rest of the volunteers and the vets set to work with the animals, going around to each enclosure, checking weight and overall health of the animals and of course worming all the animals. This is something that we have been doing with our animals for some years now in full knowledge that animals in the wild, although they would still have parasites, would be able to rid themselves of them by eating certain plants, which of course animals in captivity cannot do.

The whole task, as you can imagine, took the whole morning and started to eat into the afternoon but once finished everyone had a feeling of accomplishment as the enclosures look 10 times better than they did in the morning and we were now 100% sure that the animals were all in good condition.

Volunteer checking on the health of a monkey

We are planning on working at the zoo again in the future, making this a regular 3 month activity so that we can help keep the zoo in good condition.

A little note for those of you who may be slightly concerned that Taricaya is helping support a zoo in Puerto Maldonado, we do have ulterior motives. With the end in sight for all the paper work to do with our animal rescue centre, we will soon be receiving animals from Puerto Maldonado and most importantly from the zoo, so it’s in our best interest to help keep these animals healthy so that we can release them in the future.