The spider monkeys celebration
Sunday morning. Our “Nursery team” is starting to feel the exhaustion from having a new hatchling in the house. Feedings every 2 hours around the clock…day and night. What day is today? Liz asked herself. Ah…Sunday she thought, rubbing her eyes.
The day before it was impossible to go out to do the usual macaw nest checks. It rained very hard and it never stopped. The Tambopata River rose so much that river water was entering the clearing where the house is located. Not a trivial situation if you take into account that house is located in the flood plain 500-meters away from river shore. Trails were flooded too, so no way to get to our nests. Stressful moments for the team that was on standby all day waiting for the rain to stop so they could go check on our chicks. The river was enormous, full of branches and roaring. Nothing else to do but wait.
A couple of our nests were at their hatching “due dates” which made waiting for the rain to stop even more stressful. This was worse because Mandy Lu nest had a “fourth egg” that may have already hatched.
Monday early morning and the rain finally started to clear up. Nest check teams started to get ready and finally went out to the woods right after breakfast. When the team arrived to Mandy Lu nest, lots of noise was coming from all the surrounding trees. A big troop of Spider monkeys was hanging around the nest tree and they were quite vocal. They were jumping, moving around and making monkey noises…like trying to communicate something.
The climber, Shannon, went up. It was quite hard to heard her voice from the ground in the middle of so many spider monkey calls. Finally…a loud THREE (chicks)!!! was heard. Yes, THAT “fourth egg” had hatched.
The live of the fourth members of macaw broods is even worse than for the third chicks. Fourth eggs rarely hatch. In our 20 years of work with macaws in Tambopata, just 7% of chicks that hatch have been the fourth members of their brood. It seems like with three chicks to take care, incubation of the last egg is just bad, and egg #4 simply doesn't normally hatch. When they do hatch, chicks normally show very low weight (average = 17.5 g compared to an average = 20.5 from first and second chicks). And when they do hatch, they normally die in a couple of days. We have watched a few videos of fourth chicks interacting with their parents in the past and all of fourth siblings were ignored from hatching and died within three to four days. As a result, we have never seen a fourth chick survive and fledge in to the forests of Tambopata. Given this harsh cold reality, we took fourth chick to our nursery.
We suspect the chick hatched the previous afternoon because it was completely dry when we found it. It weighted 17.1 grams; a very low weight for a hatchling in our area. It will be a difficult road for him, and for us. Raising tiny chicks is always challenging. Especially if they arrive with such a low weight. Hopefully it will make it!!.
We named the chick “Parker” after Peter Parker of Spiderman fame in honor of all those Spider monkeys that were loudly celebrating its arrival when we went to check its nest.
Perhaps our Parker will be like the one in the movie. The skinny guy that ended up becoming the hero of the story. Maybe, with lots of sleepless nights and your help, Parker will be the very first fourth chick to fledge into the forest of Tambopata.
Wish him luck (and us) and help us spread the word about our fundraising campaign!.
2 comments