Thread by @HeatherEHeying

In Otavalo for some downtime between field sites in the jungle, we play ping pong outside on a concrete table, hike the three miles to town past llamas and streams, and watch the many species of hummingbirds, some of whom steal from the flowers they visit.

At South America's largest outdoor market, everything from alpacas and traditional weavings, to papayas and sportsbras, are sold. We are offered ponchos and guinea pigs. Women in traditional dress wear fedoras, & children guard their parents' wares while gazing into their phones.

All 129 species of Ecuador hummingbirds are recognizably hummingbirds, but the diversity is still staggering, from hermits to pufflegs to rackettails. Black-tailed train-bearers, named for their long tails, display with those feathers, sometimes clicking them in flight.

Diversity drops as you go away from the equator, and also as you move upslope. A daylong hike around Laguna Cuicocha, a crater lake at the equator, but also at an altitude of 10,650 ft, reveals few charismatic megafauna, but an abundance of tiny, flowering herbs.

More from Lago Cuicocha--this high altitude, equatorial lake brings out the inner botanist in hummingbirds, bees, and people alike.

I held optional writer's workshops for students. Working from LeGuin's "Steering the Craft," we wrote and shared and critiqued. Literary critique is different from the scientific process--you seek no objective truth--but there are still better and worse form, flow and story.

At the vast and labyrinthine outdoor market, a latter-day snake oil salesman hawks his wares, complete with an accomplice, and an elaborate story of the benefits of his special sauce. Today, cash only, you too can start feeling better for the incredibly low, low price of...

Kelly Swing, professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito and founding director of the Tiputini Biological Station, graced us with a lecture. "The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The stone age ended due to innovation--as the oil age must as well."

The daylong voyage by plane, bus, and boat, which will be the deepest into the Amazon that we will get, has old wounds and new scars from logging and oil exploration. The metal "canoe" in which we arrive at Shiripuno after sundown navigates treefalls, sometimes scraping bottom.

A storm front brought chaotic wind, fierce rain, and sounds like machinery. It felled trees, one of which buried Bret and our two boys. Students yelled for the boys until all three of them climbed out from under the tree canopy, covered in ants, but otherwise undamaged.

On a night hike with a small group, I spotted a mouse opossum on a vine overhead, carrying five visible babies in her pouch, and a sheaf of dead leaves held in her tail like a paperclip—for a nest, we guessed. She froze for a few minutes, then squeezed into a snag.

At the geographic high point of a hike in the jungle today, we arrive at a mirador that reveals the rippling, endless expanse of Amazonian canopy. While there, we are schooled in how to climb trees for fruit, Huaorani style. Men and women both do it, as Nyome demonstrates:

Today was silent day--nobody spoke until dinner. On a solo hike in the forest, I ran into one of our best students, peering into the canopy with binoculars. I looked, saw a sloth. Gave him a thumbs-up. At dinner I thanked him. "What!? I didn't see a sloth!" Crypsis is powerful.

Student presentations by candlelight in the Amazon, on prey capture in funnel-weaving spiders, nest repair in termites, flower phenology as a response to light levels, macaw vocalizations, the shape of mushrooms, food prefs in army ants, lekking in white-bearded manakins, more...

Fernando discusses the ecology of termites with students, woolly monkeys congregate overhead; and on a quiet nighttime float down the river, we watch caimans slip into the water, hardly making a ripple, their red eye-shine the only way to find them.
drive.google.com/file/d/1YSLBRO…

On the day long journey out of the Amazon, we stop at a Huaorani village. We are shown traditional ways of life--blowing darts through bamboo, dugout canoes--and also the new solar panels, on which overhead macaws, and squirrel monkeys in the trees, cast shadows.