Merry Labor Day Eve

I couldn’t make it to Estabrook Park again today, so that means more room for Amazonian wildlife. As I mentioned yesterday, we traveled back to Manaus from the Dolphin Lodge, where we spent the night, and the next morning we started the four-hour boat-car-boat trip to “Amazon Antonio’s Lodge”. While the Dolphin is south of Manaus and not on true “black water“, Amazon Antonio’s is northeast of Manaus and is supposed to be on true “black water“. One big takeaway was that Amazon Antonio’s was not supposed to have any of the mosquitoes that Dolphin lodge had, which wasn’t too many anyway, and I’ve experienced way worse in Waterford, WI. A big visual difference was that there were no floating mats of vegetation around the trees growing out of the water and even white, sandy beaches in some spots.

Anyway, the wildlife was amazing but different. Let’s get to it.

Right away after we arrived, I spotted this stunner skulking about in the foliage over the bank down to the river, and he turns out to be a blue dacnis or turquoise honeycreeper (Dacnis cayana), I can also see a female in some of the images, but I wasn’t aiming at her, so they didn’t come out as nice.

There were plenty of macaws, parrots, and parakeets around, but they were usually flying by noisily at a distance. This orange-winged amazon (Amazona amazonica), also known locally as orange-winged parrot, and its companion were happy exceptions to that rule.

There were hummingbirds, of course, and this little cutie sticking its tongue out at me appears to be a black-eared fairy (Heliothryx auritus)

Here it is feeding from the flowers of what looks like some species of tree in the Inga genus, perhaps Inga edulis, known as ice-cream bean.

On our second day at Amazon Antonio’s, our guide took us on a long hike deep into the forest. A big surprise was how much the forest changed as we got away from the river. Once we moved beyond the sandy riverbanks, which didn’t support tall trees, we came to small rolling hills covered with the kinds of tall trees we had seen at the previous lodge, and that’s when we spotted our second woodpecker of the trip, a yellow-throated woodpecker (Piculus flavigula)

We eventually reached a campsite with a nice clearing, little waterfall, and pool where our guide cooked us lunch. The soil in the clearing attracted a lot of butterflies, and here’s a trio of Florida or tropical whites (Appias drusilla).

And here’s a dapper-looking Crethon daggerwing (Marpesia crethon), cousin to the Orsilochus daggerwing (Marpesia orsilochus) we saw at the previous lodge.

Once we hiked back out to the lodge on the river, I finally got the best picture I was gonna get of this majestic-looking yellow-headed caracara (Milvago chimachima), seemingly saying to the fork-tailed flycatcher, “whadda you doin’ in my tree?” Since we had arrived at Anotnio’s, I had seen at least three individuals, perhaps a fledged family gliding from our shore to that tree and back, but I could not get a good picture, and this will have to do.

Here’s a couple of blurry pictures of a caracara snatching an eel or snake out of the river near the Dolphin lodge.

Finally, let me wrap up the first day and a half at Antonio’s with this amazing creature, which appears to be an assassin bug, perhaps (Calliclopius nigripes).