Are you a Chacalaca

Sunday Morning and 4.30am and the phone blows me out of bed, “yes” I responded, “which unit would you like to shut down”, “unit 2”, I responded once more, which was the wrong answer, well how do they expect me to give them the right answer this time in the morning. I needed to make a software change and download but it is going to have to wait for a while now. I got out of bed and went to the plant and I was still shaking having gotten out of bed in a rush and found the unit shutdown and nobody really needed me to be there but I was awake now and wanted to see what the problem was. They had icing problems in the receiving plant 700 Km away and had to shutdown. So that was it, I was awake and it was dawn. On my way back to my room for a shower I thought I would take a walk down the river at dawn to see what things I could see, I may catch some of the larger mammals maybe. I showered and got my binoculars and camera and went to the river. It was a nice fresh morning but still very humid, maybe 96% humidity. I could here hundreds of parrots screeching up along the river, there is a little island in the river and it was from there that I could here all the noises coming from, flocks of 20 50 100 at a time were flying away from the island. Very noisy and spectacular, they have been doing some sand and gravel extraction from the river bed along our side of the river and the trucks had been moving up and down the pathway leaving a very dusty path and I could see where many creatures large and small had been moving across the dust. Many small bird feet and animals with many legs probably the large millipedes,


There were also 3 tracks that must have been snakes as it was a slither mark not a track, and one was quite large, I have been told that there are many snakes in the area but they never come into the plant as it is too noisy. I walked back along the track and could here this really noisy bird calling, almost like barking, I tried to track it down and finally found some large birds sat in treetops that were calling to other close by pairs of birds. I got a good close view of them and easily identified them from pictures on the internet and they seem to be famous for this early morning racket they call bird song. Chaco Chachalacas

In fact I had mentioned to my wife previously about some large birds here she said they could be Chacalacas and we have them in Costa Rica also and it is common to insult someone who is a gossip by calling them a Chacalaca, very amusing actually. As I got back to the camp the Sunday morning ‘oh praise the wonderful military’ parade was in full swing and much of the what a great country we are and we are proud to be Peruvian and then the national anthem was being played and it always reminds me of a Monty Python thing, not sure why.

picture from www.arthurgrosset.com