Wild nightlife in the Amazon

The mineral pond is where the action is

By Roger Hamilton

We climbed up the rustic ladder to the wooden blind, perched eight meters above the forest floor. As the sun set, the forest turned gray, and then black. The buzzing and whirring of insects grew more insistent.

Below us, the last light of the day reflected off the tawny mud of a shallow pond. This was a mineral deposit, an important source of nutrients for deer, tapirs, wild pigs, and other animals, explained guide Francisco Carvalho Souza. In former times, the concentration of prey animals at this site also attracted human hunters. Today, the “hunters,” armed with flashlights and cameras, are ecotourists from the Cristalino Jungle Lodge, located in the Amazon forest of Brazil’s state of Mato Grosso.

Through the trees we could see the sky filling with stars. Below us, the mud also sparkled with dots of light, in this case the luminescent glow of hundreds of termites.

For a while, nothing stirred. Souza took a big flashlight out of his bag, and set it between us. Then we heard something moving toward us with a ponderous, deliberate rhythm. Souza touched my arm. There was a crash, and then a splash.

Souza reached for the flashlight, but still waited for the animals to come closer. The forest was filled with the sounds of mud being stepped into, stepped out of, and slurped up.

The flashlight’s pale beam found its quarry, lighting up what looked like an enormous sausage with a short proboscis like a prehistoric elephant. It was a tapir, a semiaquatic animal that at 250 kilos is the largest land mammal in South America. Souza recognized this individual from a scar on its shoulders. It could have been a souvenir from a foiled jaguar attack, he said. Or more likely, the animal could have been startled and blindly charged into a tree.

Out of the shadows stepped another tapir, smaller than the first. For a while the two groomed each other, seemingly oblivious to the beam of the flashlight. No, the light didn’t seem to bother them, said Souza. They probably consider it a strange kind of moon.

So goes nightlife in an Amazonian forest.