Due to some weird Tumblr rules about primary blogs that aren’t worth explaining, all future posts will be found at the above link. If you’re following this blog, please switch to that one. Sorry for the trouble!
Oh, and there’s a NEW PODCAST!! It’s on the new blog (:
While traveling from Ecuador to Chile, I took a few days’ break in Arequipa, Peru. The world’s two deepest canyons, Cotahuasi and Colca Canyon, are nearby. I did a three-day hike in Colca, which I thought was going to be more intense than the two-day hike, but it turns out that it’s the exact same route, only much slower. Which was great because there was time to absorb the gorgeous landscapes and examine the interesting plants. I didn’t have my recorder for sounds, but here are some pictures.
The first cross is the lookout point called Cruz del Condor, but we didn’t see any condors there. The first picture of a bird is an eagle, and the other birds later on are Andean condors. We were very lucky to see these birds. They have the largest wingspan in the world, an average of 3.2 meters or 10.5 feet. The llamas and alpacas were not in the canyon, but rather on the drive back from the canyon to Arequipa.
Below is my amazing hiking group. Thanks for making the trip so fun!
Click here to see a slideshow with pictures and sounds from the asado and the New Year’s Eve celebration.
I had the wonderful luck to be invited to celebrate New Year’s Eve with a family from Chepu, a rural community on the island of Chiloé. They made a delicious asado of lamb and pork, which is sort of like a barbeque, but the meat is cooked by continually turning it on a stick. There were some traditions that are the same as in the US, like counting down the last few seconds to midnight and drinking champagne. There were other traditions that we also celebrate in my family, but I suspect (I’m not sure) that they come from my Puerto Rican mother, and are not common in all of the US: to wear new clothes and jewelry for luck in the coming year, and to eat grapes just after midnight. And there was one tradition that I’d never experienced: to wear new yellow underwear. So that’s why I saw a lot of street vendors in Santiago selling yellow underwear last week! I’d thought that some factory had made an excess of yellow underwear by accident, and someone sold it to all the vendors for a cheap price!
When I recorded the sound of the asado cooking, at first I asked the nearby people to be quiet for a minute, a request that was almost impossible to complete. But afterward when I listened to the recording, I realized that the “interruptions” of people talking were actually the best parts. At the beginning you can hear six-year-old Monserrat saying, “This is an asado.” And in particular, there was a segment ruined by wind that was funny:
Uncle César, in reference to Uncle Cristián: He talks more than the asado!
Uncle Cristián: I was trying to say that the only sound you can hear is the affection from the people that she came to visit.
Thank you so much to the family of Adolfo and Sonia for the hospitality that they’ve shown me. Happy New Year!
Click here to see a slideshow with pictures and sounds from the asado and the New Year’s Eve celebration.
(ps please forgive the peppering with links to my host family’s new website…it doesn’t show up in Google yet)
I was on the move for several weeks getting from Ecuador to Chile by bus, train, and plane, so I haven’t had much time to process pictures and audio lately. Now I’m more or less settled for the next two months on the island of Chiloé, which is in some respects strikingly similar to Ireland (where I’ve vacationed several times), especially in terms of weather—so there will be lots of rainy days to work on the massive amounts of audio and photos that I’ve accumulated. Keep an eye on the website, and get excited for new podcasts!
There is also a lot of rainy day time to read my Christmas present, a truly excellent annotated version of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (thanks, Mom!). So if my writing becomes a bit flowery and my sentences a bit long, it’s because my only reading material was written 150 years ago.
Hope you had a wonderful winter holiday and a merry Christmas! My mom and sister came to see me in Santiago and Valparaíso, and we had a lovely time together.
As they say in Chile, Felices Pascuas! I thought Pascua meant Easter, but I looked it up and apparently it means Christmas, Easter, and Passover. So merry Christmas, happy Easter, and happy Passover!
Podcast now available on iTunes 
I would definitely not describe myself as tech-savvy, but somehow I did it! You can now subscribe to the Wandering Nature podcast through iTunes by clicking on the title of this post, or here. If you don’t like iTunes but do want to subscribe, you can use this platform instead.
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! Instead of turkey, I had some delicious cuy (guinea pig, a typical protein source in many Andean cultures).
Click here to see a slideshow with pictures and audio from the market.
Last week I went to the coast and had a lovely time in Puerto López, located right next to the Parque Nacional Machalilla. One of the coolest sights was the morning fish market.
Before 6AM the boats begin arriving and unloading the night’s catch onto the beach (there are no docks). Men carry buckets and bins of fish from the boats to the trucks bound for Guayaquil, Manta, and Quito. They try not to spill to the pelicans in the water or to the vultures on land, and they go quickly to avoid losing too many fish to the pteradactyl-like frigate birds swooping down for breakfast.
Some of the fish that don’t go on the trucks are gutted and filleted right away. And if you care for a breakfast of ceviche or fish soup (delicious after an overnight bus ride!), a couple of restaurants are just a few more steps up the beach.
I was surprised to see so many sharks. A food chain suffers when the top predators (those that are not hunted by other predators) are removed and their prey populations can grow unchecked, placing pressure on the lower links in the chain. When I visited the national park, the tour guide explained that it is illegal to fish for sharks but they may be sold if caught accidentally (or “accidentally”) in the nets.
Click here to see a slideshow with pictures and audio from the market.
Podcast Episode 1: Habits of Consumption
In this episode…
The slate-throated whitestart (Myioborus miniatus) is a bird that lives in the cloud forest and uses an interesting trick to find food. We also discuss the unique manner of drinking beer in Ecuador.
Myioborus miniatus:
Myioborus melanocephalus:
Myioborus photos courtesy of Michael Woodruff
Once I’ve accumulated a few episodes, I’ll start publishing these regularly to iTunes. I’ll let you know when that happens.
Theme music: Pacifico (James Beaudreau) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Other music in order of appearance:
Strayhorn (James Beaudreau) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now (The Moonlighters) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Liszt Millipede (Lanark) / CC BY-NC 3.0
Satie Ladybug (Lanark) / CC BY-NC 3.0
The Day Bartender (Al Duvall) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
To download, click the link below, then choose “save source” from the drop-down arrow on the right side.
download ↓
Tail feather experiment (discussed in podcast episode 1 below)
The first photo shows the tail feather patterns of the Costa Rican (l) and Ecuadorian (r) subspecies of Myioborus miniatus. In the last photo, the scientists (l to r) are Beata Orzowska, Beata Dulisz, and Jacek Nowakowski (Tadeusz Stawarczyk, who was interviewed, is not shown).
Stabilimenta
The thick zigzags in this spider web are called stabilimenta. Many spiders make a web in the evening and take it down at dawn, but spiders who have stabilimenta in their webs can successfully keep the webs up all day long. The zigzags are like warning signs to birds that say, “Watch out! Spider web here!” A bird obviously would not want to crash into a spider web anymore than you would, so when it sees the warning sign it performs evasive action. Webs without stabilimenta often do not survive the day, even if the spider leaves the web up. The stabilimenta cost a lot of energy to create, but they are worth the investment because more often than not they save the web from being accidentally destroyed by birds.
At least, this is one theory for their purpose; there is evidence to support other ideas as well.
This species is Argiope argentata. Photo taken in Atahualpa, Pichincha Province, Ecuador.
reference: J. Kricher, A Neotropical Companion (Princeton University Press, Princeton, ed. 2, 1997)
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