PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

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part 9 of the great bolivian parrot tour: run, rabbit, run 2011-05-03 - 8:32 a.m. all photos � 2011 by elaine radford my cessna takes off Tuesday, April 19, San Matias, Santa Cruz, to San Carlo, Cochambamba, Bolivia You have reached Part 9 of the incredible Bolivian parrot tour. To start at the beginning, you may want to follow these links: Part #1: Peach-Front Conure Joins the Bird List Part #2: Blockades Can't Block Us Part #3: I Am the Seed-Eater King Part #4: Blue-Throated Macaw with photos, Can Your Bird List Do That? Part #5: You Didn't Expect Sand-Dunes in Bolivia, Didja Part #6: The One Where I Lease a Cessna and Find the Hyacinth Macaw Part #7: Hyacinth Macaws Get Naughty Part #8: Parable of the Peachfronts Today is just a travel day, and you could skip it if you liked. Come back tomorrow for more highly endangered Bolivian macaw madness. The night before, perhaps having noticed that we'd each drunk a couple cans of Pace�a beer, the cook served some Yerba Mat� after dinner. Since it had caffeine, and we planned on an early start in the morning, we suggested that she put it in a thermos so we could have it when we woke up. She also left us the leftover empenadas. So, in the morning, I knew I could only really eat one empanada, but they were so tasty that I went back and tried to eat a second, and a rooster who had been shadowing me for two days, figuring me for a soft touch tourist, got half of the second one. I waved good-bye to the Plumbeous Ibis who was guarding his nest so carefully -- and no wonder, since his mate was sitting next to, not on, the well-grown youngster they'd produced. Then we hopped onto our Cessna, and away we flew. Either it was an exceptionally smooooth ride, or the Yerba Mat� had less caffeine than I'd been led to believe -- I vote both-- but I nodded off and suddenly jerked awake, and we were descending into Santa Cruz. Two hours gone, just like that. Ha. I don't sleep that well in business class, at least not if business class is American Airlines Flight 922. an old bird phone booth outside el trompillo airport, i THINK it's a parrot, if so, the paint job is seriously rusty...rust never sleeps We met with C. again, our driver on the Lomas de Arena day. S. & I were the only passengers for this portion of the journey. PG finally got a recording of Hyacinth Macaw without any cows on it, so I think he had a successful trip, although he also learned that our ranch was not capable of hosting a group of 8 tourists, unless the owner wanted to make significant modifications. He also learned that when you have a noob to tourism, like this rancher, you can't leave ANYTHING to common sense. I didn't think I'd have to tell him to pack beer and Coca-Cola, grumbled PG. Oh well, I don't mind being the experiment. Let Field Guides follow in my footprints. Their bird list might be bigger, but my stories are whackier. We drove and drove and drove and drove, with some stops here and there to buy satsumas (mandarina, I think in Spanish, which is close to the American word "Mandarin" used everywhere except Louisiana), to pick up "medicine" in the farmacia, and to check for birds here and there. My favorite bird of the day, as we moved into cactus country, was the White-Fronted Woodpecker, but I didn't quite yet know how thick on the ground these birds would prove to be. My life bird of the day was Small-Billed Elaenia. So the drive. I had already abandoned seat belts on my first day, at my first stop, way back in Trinidad, on the same day I hopped off the plane. It just makes it too hard to get in and get out and see the birds. I didn't even bother to notice to see if this van even had seat-belts. Yeah, I know, I know. Bird-watchers die in auto accidents. But hey, do you want to live forever? Defying death, it's what we do here at Peachfront Dot Com. pils apple juice, brought to you by the highly endangered red-fronted macaw OK, so maybe at the 30 kilometers an hour possible on much of the roadway, it would be hard to get up to any death-defying driving stunts. But it makes for a more colorful story, doesn't it? Actually, our greatest risk was probably saddle sores, coming the day after the long horseback ride. I was doing OK, but poor S. had a backache and finally broke down and went to some rural pharmacy. The prescribed medicine proved to be a big bag of coca leaves. It actually has a fairly strong odor, so I'm no longer impressed by the exploits of the coca-finding drug dogs, but soon it was all chewed and, if it isn't my imagination, the van picked up a little speed. For lunch we stopped in Semaipata, apparently a great tourist destination and ex-pat hang-out. However, as I've said many times before in this narrative, it was still low season, rainy season, green season -- whatever you like to call it. We were the only people in the caf�, and the no-doubt bored bartender/waiter played depressing songs from my youth like Pink Floyd's "Breathe" and Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," which are certainly fine songs that I have owned from the time the world was new...but I'm not sure why a tourist needs depressing songs at lunch. Why not some nice neutral jazz or some music of the people or something? Turned down real low so that you don't replace the ear-worm of "I am the Lizard King!" with "Run Rabbit Run! Dig that hole! Forget the Sun! It's time to Dig Another One!" The drive took 10 hours through some extremely scenic Western-style countryside. The trouble is, I slept through a lot of it. Nope, I gave it the road test, and Yerba Mat� won't be replacing coffee as my personal caffeine source any time soon. Quite suddenly, it was full dark. We pulled up to the bank of a river. C. said something in Spanish and then S. said something along the lines of, That's it. The water's too high. We can't drive any further. We have to walk. A bit dazed from over-napping, I blinked at the dark, rushing water and thought, Say what? We needed horses to ford streams way less streamier than this. I looked around and I finally said it: I hope there's a bridge. Oh yah, there's a bridge. The Bolivian guys seemed to say "yah" a lot. Maybe it's the German Mennonite influence, although I didn't see any actual Mennonites on this particular trip. Anyhoo, whew, there's a bridge. Apparently it was behind some trees and around the bend, and I just couldn't see it in the dark. You guys had me worried for a minute. So we walked over to the lodge, and the couple running it came out and showed me to my room. I had the Paraba Barba Azul guestroom. "Blue-Throated Macaw." Cute. It was all decorated in Blue-Throated Macaw motif, down to the BT Macaw on the keychain -- the keychain I did not use, since I didn't want to carry a key considering that I was the only guest and crime is pretty much an unknown to this area. So I just let my door unlocked. But if I'd wanted to tote a key around, I would have had a nice carved Blue-Throated Macaw on it. This is the Red-Fronted Macaw Lodge -- Paraba Frente Roja in Bolivian Spanish -- and, since a lot of eco-lodges only have generators, hence only a few hours of electricity a night, let me point out that this lodge DOES have electricity. Yay. It's near San Carlo, Cochambamba, Bolivia, which is frankly a village, a smaller village than Folsom, Louisiana, United States of America. And there are two other smaller villages nearby. But there's electricity and street-lamps, as well as some thriving agricultural fields. The story of the lodge is that there are only about 600 Red-Fronts left, if I understand right. It's a Bolivian endemic. So the story goes, when the drug kingpin sets up his private zoo and decides to collect all of the species of Macaw, if he's a completist, eventually he gets to the Blue-Throated and the Red-Fronted Macaw. So some unethical individuals paid the villagers some insufficient fee to collect the babies from the cliff. A species with no babies dies out. Now, the conservationists have a plan where the profits can be split fourways, between the lodge and the three villages. There is more profit to the people in letting the birds live outdoors and do all the work of reproducing themselves and letting the genuine bird-watchers come to them, and it sounds like the villages actually get more money this way, than from the pitiful pay-off from the smugglers. Crime may pay, but it usually doesn't pay enough. On this note, I have to admit, I don't know who these people are who traffic in parrots. I've never known. PG said that it was a sad reality of his work in fund-raising that he'd seen more captive Hyacinths than wild ones. Well, I've never seen a captive one, other than the two at Audubon Zoo. I mean, when I used to do some free-lance writing for Bird Talk, I interviewed a Hyacinth Macaw breeder, but I'll tell you a secret: I didn't get to meet the guy -- or his no doubt charming Hyacinths -- on what I was paid. It was a phone interview. They used to say, in the 80s, that the wildlife trade was as profitable as the drug trade. (I never hear anyone say that any more. It was probably never quite true, and then a lot of the profit in the wildlife trade collapsed with the widespread release of Viagra, which tells you just how much of the world's tigers, rhinoceros, and so on were being eaten to create hard-ons.) But at that time they did say so. And it just mystified me. I mean, drugs were (are!) everywhere. If you need drugs, you can get out on the street and have them in your hand in minutes. But who are these wildlife buyers? You never meet these people. Can just a few billionaires really lay waste to the entire planet? Well, I suppose they can. The billionaires have eaten the Spix Macaw. And soon they will eat us. And we'll never see them coming. The druggies are in your face, in your neighborhood for sure, sometimes even in your circle of friends or family. You see them. You know you have to fight them. But the people eating the world? You never encounter these people in the real world. And so when a forest is stolen, or a species is stolen, or a decent climate is stolen, you're left scratching your head, asking yourself, What the hell just happened? Be that as it may, my suitcase was definitely more holy than righteous by now. It's a good thing I brought mostly old, disposable clothing, because I wasn't sure if this bag was going to completely disintegrate on the flight back to New Orleans. I could lighten the load by disposing of a few smelly socks and shirts already, although I held back a couple of awful socks to be shoe shine cloths. Worse case, I'd end up wearing the good shoes, hat, and photo vest on the way back, and stuffing both bird books into the computer bag along with the binoculars, cameras, and phone. Considering I was in business class, they might even tape my bag for me at the airport. Why not? So it's dark, and we've been traveling all day -- 2 hours by Cessna, 10 by van -- and we skipped the birdlist that day. We had a beer and then I heard a very disturbing story which makes me sad, although it is, in a way, a story I've heard many times before and that's probably why it makes me sad. I won't use real names, nor will I speak to the accuracy of this story, and the person who told me the story is certainly not responsible for how I heard the story or how I typed it down many days later. Any politicians who get their feelings hurt by reading my website probably have too much time on their hands anyway. So, with those caveats, here is the story: To the world [Redacted name of popular leader] says that he represents the indigenous people, but he represents only the indigenous highland people. Seventy percent of the indigenous people are from the lowland communities. He doesn't stand for us. So Name Redacted was elected on the promise that he would give people land. Well, he buys their votes, and then two or three years go by, and then the people start to say, Hey, Name Redacted, Where is our land? Now we will pause the video right here, and I may as well admit that I heard the same promises, and I thought, as you probably did, well, Name Redacted will ask of the billionaires and millionaires to give up a bit of their land to help those who have nothing. And this is nothing particular to Bolivia, since we are having the same debate in America today -- our health care system is the joke of the world, our bridges are falling down, our dams are getting a little shaky -- but the billionaires don't wanna pay any taxes. They don't want to give up any little thing, even though they wouldn't even notice the little thing they would give up. Did the man who stole the last Spix Macaw on earth...do you really think that man's life was any better or happier for even a milli-second because he owned the last Spix Macaw? Look at Donald Trump. Is that a happy man? People are billionaires precisely because there is something wrong with them, because they are an endless pit of needing to out-do someone on yet another deal, because they are insatiable and can never be happy no matter how much they already have. Sure, they'll bitch if they have to pay a fair share of taxes, but so what? They'll bitch anyway. They're just miserable people with a hole inside that nobody can fill. But I digress. Back to Bolivia. Do you think Name Redacted asked some fat cat to give up part of his holdings? Ha. Billlionaires have money, guns, and lawyers -- and, in fairness to him, I'm aware of at least one assassination attempt on his life. There may have been others. So Name Redacted instead took a look at the map and decided on a different solution. He said our reserve was too large and he gave our forest away but we are already living in our forest. And he said that he was giving to the poor people but Mary, poor people don't come with chain saws and a logging truck. And the soil of the Amazon is not good for crops, Here it has only one harvest. So they have to cut again. And they killed the jaguar in our forest, because they cut a new field every year, until the forest was gone, and the jaguar had no choice but to hunt the children. We are asking Greenpeace to look into it but... I already know the "but." Greenpeace doesn't do subtle, and trying to explain how one indigenous group can be racist or exploitive toward another indigenous group when "hell, they all look alike to us," well, it's a problem. More telegenic to save the whales. As I've said before, I don't get involved in the politics of other countries. I don't really know enough, and I only hear one side, and anyway if you weren't there, you don't really know what happened. But, for what it's worth, this was the story I heard and the thoughts I had. You have just read Part 9 of the amazing Bolivian parrot tour. Continue to part 10 for all the Red-Fronted Macaws you can juggle. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford