First, a few facts:

The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest and is spread across more than 2.5 million square miles and covers parts of Brazil, Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.

30% of the world's rainforest lies within Amazonia.

Scientists estimate that there are between 800 thousand and 5 million animal species in the jungle, about 23% of all the species on the planet.

An area of the jungle equal to the size of France has been lost to deforestation.

Every year, each acre of forest converts 1000 pounds of carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Manaus Opera House

It's Friday the first of September, and I've arrived in Manaus, at the start of my journey, into the Amazon forest. It's very noisy outside, and in the streets there's a lot of whistling, and periodically, loud speaker vans go up the street.

I don't understand exactly what they're saying, but I suspect it's all part of the election campaign. There are a lot of posters about and I believe the elections take place in October. I arrived in Manaus, late last night, after a very long flight from Brasilia.

Manaus lies on the banks of the river Naigro, about 10k up stream from the confluence of the two rivers that form the Amazon. It's a town that was originally based on rubber, for when rubber was need for car tyres in the late nineteenth century, and Manaus became a very wealthy place.

One of the things that distinguished it, was that it had its own opera house. Mayor Eduardo Ribeiro, decided that the opera house should be built, it was built at the height of the rubber boom in 1896, and it is an incredible building.

Much of the material used to make it was imported. So for example the pillars inside the theatre are made of cast iron, specially cast in Glasgow and shipped out here. There's a lot of Italian marble, some beautiful wooden floors, and the paintings on the wall were specially commissioned in Paris, and also shipped out here.

Killer ants

Today, I've been walking through the jungle. It's an inhospitable place - there are a lot of mosquitos, a lot of biting insects, and there are some particularly nasty horse flies, with mouth parts that are , at least half a centimetre long, and if they do dig into you they give you a very nasty bite.

There's a variety of ants, small and large, some of them harmless some of them far from harmless, and you can see little patches of cleared vegetation where soldier ants march. I watched a column of ants marching along a tree trunk. It’s something that you definitely try and keep clear of, because any obstruction in their path, they’ll just swarm over it and if it's an animal, kill it, and carry it off.

I think if you are a zoologist, you read about a lot of animals, but when you actually encounter them in the wild, sometimes can be the most awe inspiring experience. It's very difficult to convey it to somebody else, you have to be there to understand it.

It's sad to think that these forests are being cut and burnt at such a great rate, fast disappearing, and the consequences of the loss of forests are very difficult to comprehend. One thing is clear - once they're gone, they're gone forever, and we must do a lot more to, reduce our demands for the woods from the forest, so that there isn't the financial incentive, to cut and burn.

I'm standing on the back end of the boat, it's moored in the harbour area here. The harbour is actually a very grand term. I mean, a little inlet. It's almost dark now and, I can hear the sounds of bats just occasionally, there are lots of crickets and bush crickets in the undergrowth, and of course there's the frogs sounding rather like outboard motors in the distance. I'm just waiting for the people who've been out hunting for Caiman to come back. And of course I can't determine at the moment whether what I'm hearing is the boat in the distance, or just a frog in the distance, but we'll see.

Mysterious noises

Well I'm lying in my hammock, in the cool of the evening, listening to all the sounds around me, and I'm embarrassed to say that despite being someone who works on animal sounds, most of them are new to me and I can't recognise what's producing them.

There's a very interesting ultrasonic click out there with regular intervals and whatever's producing it is flying around me, and I don't know what it is. I thought at first it might be several animals in different places, giving the impression of something flying, but I'm convinced now, that it's one animal, and it's flying around here, and it's clicking away every half second or so. I should think most of the signals in the ultrasonic range I'm just hearing, either the lower end of the signal, or some sub-harmonic of it.

I can only think that it's a moth producing interference with the bat's echo location system. It's certainly not a bat because I can't see the bats flying around, and it's quite high up, but at the moment, it's baffling me. And one of the irritating things if you're a naturalist, is that you go to a new area, and you're almost back to square one. Everything's new, things you can't identify and I feel not a complete idiot, but certainly an idiot wandering around and not being able to identify anything I can see.

In the background there's a noise, that might be an outboard motor, but is probably a frog imitating an outboard motor, and it goes for a period and then it cuts out, and then it restarts again. The noises here in the Amazon are very interesting. I just heard a bird singing, again I don't know what it is, and in the background there's some perpetual noise which must be bush crickets.

Close encounters with a manatee

I've just returned from a trip out onto the river looking for Caiman. As we went up the river we encountered areas of vegetation which in some cases were just the tops of the trees, showing through the water.

In amongst these were Caiman and the guide on the front of the boat, had a very bright light, which he shone across the vegetation, trying to see the Caiman. He then, moved in and managed to grab one off the vegetation and lift it into the boat, not of course a very large one, about a metre in length overall.

It had an elongated snout, and they were certainly interesting to look at. But I'd have to say that overall, the wildlife here has been a bit of a disappointment.

Suddenly, there was pandemonium in the boat. Ahead of us appeared a black hump in the water, the boat veered round to the left and the boatman immediately cut the engine.

The guide and I looked over the side. The black hump disappeared, for a few moments, and then reappeared closer to the boat, but in front of the hump, was a pair of nostrils, and you could hear the animal exhaling. It was a manatee, the sea cow, an animal that lives in the waters of the Amazon, grazing on all the under water vegetation.

We sat still in the boat watching it, as it came up to breathe, dived again, and then came back up to breathe, and then suddenly, right alongside the boat, it flipped its tail up, showering us with water, and dived. And although we waited around for over ten minutes, we didn't see it again. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to photograph it.

An animal that used to be immensely common here, but has now been hunted almost to the verge of extinction. In fact the guide who'd been working, taking parties of zoologists up and down the Amazon for fifteen years, had never seen one himself, and I of course had certainly never seen one. Apart from the wonder of seeing the animal, there was of course great concern. This manatee was out in open water, in the far distance we could see the local fishermen just coming out to start the fishing for the day, and the guide told me in no uncertain terms, that if they saw it, they'd kill it immediately, because it would represent, three or four days food for a good many families. I could only hope that splendid animal managed to get away and is still eating its way through the vegetation of the Amazon river.

Content last updated: 07/07/2006

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