Amazon Wildlife: Howler Monkeys, Pink Dolphins, and the Parrot Clay Lick

The parrot clay lick required two hours of patience. The clay lick is a section of exposed riverbank where the clay contains minerals, particularly kaolin, that neutralise the acids and toxins present in the seeds and unripe fruits that make up much of the parrot diet. Every morning, a rotating community of parrots, macaws, and parakeets descends to lick the clay before feeding, a behaviour that has been documented across the Amazon basin and that represents one of the clearest examples of what ecologists call geophagy, the intentional consumption of soil for nutritional or medicinal purposes. The parrots approach cautiously because the clay lick, being predictable and concentrated, is also an attractive hunting location for predators, and on several occasions during our wait the entire flock spooked at a hawk or some disturbance in the canopy and wheeled away in a cloud of noise and colour, requiring the whole process of cautious approach to begin again. When they finally landed on the bank in sufficient numbers and the full noise of several hundred parrots feeding together became the ambient sound, it was remarkable in the way of things that require patience to arrive at and deliver more than expected when they do.

The pink river dolphin of the Amazon, Inia geoffrensis, is not pink in the way that flamingos are pink. The colouration develops in adult males, caused by the accumulation of blood vessels near the skin surface over years of minor abrasions in the shallow, debris-filled waters of the river system, and intensifies during social excitement or stress. The animal we saw was largely grey with patches of pinkish flushing, surfacing briefly on the far side of the canoe before disappearing again. They are solitary in the way of animals whose environment provides enough food that cooperation isn’t necessary, navigating the turbid river water by echolocation in conditions where visibility is essentially zero. Unlike oceanic dolphins they do not perform, do not jump, do not follow boats. They surface, breathe, and submerge in a sequence that gives you approximately half a second to register what you are looking at. My photograph is, objectively, a picture of brown water with a vague shape at the edge. The actual sighting was better than the photograph suggests, which is not infrequently the case.

The cayman hunting was conducted from a slow canoe in the dark with torches. Cayman eyes reflect light, which is the method of location: you sweep the bank with the torch and look for the red-orange reflection of the tapetum lucidum, the reflective layer behind the retina that most nocturnal reptiles possess and that makes them visible in the dark in exactly the way that road signs are visible in headlights. The juvenile spectacled cayman we found were a metre and a half or so, sitting at the water’s edge with the specific stillness of animals that are not doing nothing but are, in fact, doing something more sophisticated than motion. Freddy picked one up for a closer inspection and set it down again in the water. The cayman did not appear to appreciate this but was not harmed by it.

I left the Amazon with a greater respect for the planet and its processes, which is the formulation you reach for when you have been somewhere that exceeds your existing vocabulary. What I actually left with was something more specific: the understanding that an intact ecosystem is a thing of such complexity and interdependence that the removal of any component changes everything else, and that the Amazon is being dismantled at a rate that its complexity cannot absorb. This is a known fact. Being in the Amazon makes it felt rather than known, which is a different category of understanding and possibly more durable.