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Days adrift. Click here to see our best and worst experiences so far.

5232

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35

Bus, train and taxi rides. Click here to see all posts relating to transport. (56 posts)

185

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581

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15

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1157

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13288

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63

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1

Otters spotted. Click here to go to our website about otters: amblonyx.com

45

...two travellers in search of the world's wildlife

HOME> Ecuador> Life in the Amazon

17 July 2011

Life in the Amazon

Ecuador, Photos

Tropical rainforests are absolutely the best for sheer variety of life. Photography is challenging, though; down in the jungle there’s very little light even in the middle of the day, and everything from the bugs through the birds to the monkeys has a tendancy to jump, scamper or fly away after the briefest glimpse. Lots of fiddling with ISO levels and shutter speed is needed to get a decent shot.

The Amazonian jungle is totally bananas - there is life everywhere and in a thousand surprising and amazing forms

$Let\'s start basic and work up the evolutionary ladder. You can\'t get much more basic than fungi$

But the fungi here take some bizarre forms a million miles away from the umbrella toadstools back home

Here a yellow fungus grows on a dead moth - it infects the moth in life and rewires its brain so that the moth flies high, meaning the fungus can spread its spores over a wider area once the host is dead

Above fungi come plants, and few are more beautiful than the orchids which grow abundantly amongst the greenery

The Polkadot Tree Frog, absolutely tiny and jemlike

This highly patterned chap is a Clown Tree Frog

Next up would be the ancient reptiles, like this Forest Dragon

And this beautiful fellow is a Green and Rufous Kingfisher

$To be honest, I don\'t know if this is a fruit or a fungus or the home of some bizarre animal$

Which brings us onto invertebrates, or bugs if you prefer - this is a nocturnal grasshopper

And of course this is a Tarantula! This fella was as big as he looks, but not poisonous enough to hurt a human

However this Wolf Spider is a very different story - aggressive and seriously venomous

Weirdest of the weird is this Tailless Whip-Scorpion, harmless to us but deadly to little insects

Perhaps like this beautiful little butterfly with almost transparent wings - I love the little touch of pink

Biggest and weirdest, the Hoatzin

This minature toucan is the Ivory-billed Aracari

Would you like a nut? What an admirably generous bird

Amphibians were the first primitive vertebrates to crawl out of the sea, although these jungle frogs look beautifully made and anything but primitive

This is the rarely seen Tiny Shower Lizard... okay, so its real name is the Bridled Forest Gecko

We saw five kinds of snake, but the rarest and deadliest is this small Bushmaster - very able to kill a man

Reptiles learned to fly, then grew feathers and so became birds - this is the Tropical Kingbird

And in contrast, the tiniest we saw was this little Straight-billed Hermit hummingbird

$The White-throated Toucan\'s beak is so long it was hard to get a shot without some branch in the way$

Final bird, promise. The White-tailed Trogon

They are amazingly acrobatic at clambering and leaping through the trees

Nyaaaaaa! The end

$It\'s very hard to stop including beautiful bird photos - this irridescent green chap is the White-chinned Jacamar$

So that leaves us only with mammals, like these fuzzy little bats nesting in a tree hollow

$Or this Three-toed Sloth, forty metres up in the canopy. It\'s there if you look closely enough...$

But the main mammals you see in the jungle are monkeys - and this is the charming little Squirrel Monkey

Next up is the White-fronted Capuchin, a slightly bigger monkey with a prehensile tail - you can just see how it is curled around a branch behind him

The biggest monkeys were the Red Howlers, whose loud whooping could often be heard across the forest

$A pair of Red Howlers. Their tails help them balance - notice how the left one isn\'t even holding onto his perch$

The Night Monkey is the only nocturnal monkey in the jungle. So his name is appropriate, if not very inventive. Nice eyebrows

And this little chap is the smallest monkey in the world, the tiny Pygmy Marmoset

But my favourites were probably the Black-mantled Tamarins, also pretty tiny and very messy eaters

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Tags: jungle, wildlife

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