Today I watched a child kiss her pregnant mother goodbye on the stomach. Children are that important in Peru. Being a naturalist means doubling as a midwife in the Amazon, as Richard Fowler has found on five occasions. Probing the deepest Amazon he is legend in backwater villages as the Lone Ranger midwife where there [...]
It's not true people are the same everywhere, but what about the ignored species? I'm on a Darwinian voyage around the world by plane, bus and thumb, and now in Sumatra, Indonesia, where the contrast of species, including our own, is great, with the most interesting extremes. The Sumatra butterflies have the strongest wing attachments, [...]
The talent of Dow-kietl, the shiny green frog that exudes Sapo or frog sweat to paralyze the biting jaws of predator snakes, was hidden from the western world until Peter Gorman introduced the ´death experience´ to the N.Y. American Museum of Natural History in 1986, and then to Amazon outward bounders. Last night I witnessed [...]
Panama's historic Darién Gap - a 10,000-square-mile swath of jungle on the border of Central and South America - has eaten explorers alive for centuries. Today, guerrillas, American trained Panamanian soldiers, drug smugglers, their bushwhackers, poachers, and jaguars rule this vast no-man's-land. I've tried to penetrate the Darien four times, and turned back as many, [...]
Black smoke shot up the stack of a tramp steamer that began a voyage that haunts me to this day (2014). Any Amazon excursion has three stages, and this was the first, on a triple deck ship from the furthermost port or Iquitos, Peru for a few days on the Rio Amazon to the mouth [...]
I saw my first desert big cat on a hot day (2008) in McCoy Wash northwest of Blythe, Ca. a few hours ago. It was just another 110-degree August walk when a black cloud formed, reared in the east and approached on the wind. Suddenly the sun was blotted as sand blew horizontally at 40mph [...]
I enter Nicaragua, a country I know little about except for a reputation of being the poorest and most rewarding spot in Central America, in a motorized canoe at the remote port of San Carlos. A yellow canvas awning shades two dozen jabbering Latinas with their stores and me from the blazing sun and whatever [...]
It is early June, bouncing on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River racing through Idaho in flood with ice melt down from the Rockies. Our group of six divvies on two 12-foot Navy rubber rafts plus two kayaks, with battling oars in my own uncalloused hands. I have never oared a raft before, but [...]
I've had a small, new e-mail exchange with the Amazon Walker. Backing up 15 years I should tell you that one sleepless night I determined to walk the length of the Amazon basin alongside the Amazon River. The best maps -- and I don't claim to have the best -- showed a dirt track ambling [...]
An aorta squirts out from the heart of Iquitos called the Boulevard that conveys tourists along the scenic Rio Amazon and to their hotels. Ten blocks south of Plaza de Armas, the ornate promenade abruptly tapers to a muddy track at the entrance to waterfront Belen. This is Dog Corner, at Ramirez Hurtado and Ucayali [...]