Cock of the Rock!

The falls, the tank bromeliads, the froglets would have been enough, more than enough. But Guyana's Kaieteur Falls Park would give us so much more in our too-short afternoon there. Because there is a bird living there, in this impossibly magical, vine-draped steaming forest, who can hurt your eyes with its color. It is the legendary cock of the rock.

I know. It's a weird name. Google it, and you get all kinds of heavy metal images right alongside stunning photos of a brilliant bird, an impossible bird. I didn't understand where it got its name until I walked in its habitat.
The cock of the rock needs rocks where it can nest. Huge, towering walls and slabs and jumbles of rock. The Science Chimp is elated to say that she will report later on the nesting habits of this marvelous bird. First, she needed to see her very first COTR. You can just imagine how excited I was. Wending our way silently through the forest, the wet floor padding our footfalls, we watched our guide and froze when he motioned that he had spotted the bird, low down in the jungly tangle, some distance ahead. We were approaching the lek site of a group of male COTR's, where they pose and display, hoping to attract visits from the burnt-brown females. Our first looks were a bit compromised by vegetation, but it was clear we had one heck of a bird in our sights.
As quietly as we could, we maneuvered around until we could see and shoot around the obscuring leaves.I shot image after image, upping my ISO to 1600, leaning against trees for support to lessen lens shake. I'm not digiscoping here, just pushing my 300 mm. telephoto lens to the maxx in the almost hopelessly dark and lightless jungle.This is not some little songbird. It's a cotinga, one of the suboscine passerines, and a honkin' big one, about the size of a city pigeon. And the color of a neon orange traffic cone. There's no missing it, even as it sits quietly and still. Think about a pigeon this color and you get some idea what an impression it makes.

Nearer, nearer, trying hard not to upset the beautiful bird who perched so calmly for us. Ooh. What's that foofuraw coming off his back?
They're filamentous plumes, orange as shredded carrots, that the female COTR likes to nibble on as the male crouches motionless on the ground before her. Nice touch.

Changing perches, he showed what a beefy broth of a beast he really was. Look at those strong yellow feet. Hey, Mr. Tangerine Man. That's a semicircular crest, neatly edged in burnt orange, that he can erect and push forward so as to completely hide his bill. Not a whole lot of tail on this bird. But he's got a very cool rump. The frills on it reminded me of those awful panties people used to put on little girls, the kind meant to stick out from under a too-short Easter dress, with ranks of frills on them. I wish I could purge such untoward thoughts when I look at a bird, but they well up nonetheless.
Though it's not that close, this is my favorite shot of the bird, on alert.
Let's blow that one up, shall we?
Right after I took this photo, he whirled off to a deeper, more obscure place, on a gasp of pinwheeling wings. Who'd have thought he'd be tricked out in black and white wheels? I was laid out, so much more than I'd ever hoped to see of a bird I'd dreamt of since I was seven. Ahh, thank you, cock of the rock. We'll leave you in peace now. And I will use this image later to rekindle my connection with you...

Kaieteur Falls, Guyana

The falls held us in its thrall as we wolfed down the best meal of the trip-homemade Indian curry wraps, still piping hot, wrapped in foil. Nothing tastes better than good hot food, outdoors.
Life IS good. Even at 90 degrees and who-knows-what humidity. It was SO HOT.

Kaieteur Falls is not just beautiful. It's also a brewery for biodiversity. Think 20,000 species of plants on the Shield. No wonder I had not the faintest clue what I was looking at most of the time. I think these tiny purple jobs were orchids, but...who knows what this little grassy but not grassy pompom thingy could be? It's weird for a Science Chimp to look at something and not even be able to get it down to family, much less genus or species. Caryophyllaceae? Beats me. Bignoniaceae? Dunno. Pretty vine, though.

It's also sort of fun to be forced to shrug and appreciate a strange plant without naming it...for awhile. This one was blooming, innocent of leaves or anything but a golden flower, on the forest floor. Huh?My inner Chimp was fretting badly on this trip, wanting to know, wanting to know. Dunno. Arggh. A huge rhododendron-like shrub with very un-rhody flowers, reminiscent of those of the mayapple. For all I knew I was looking at something that occurs nowhere else.

Like these CARNIVOROUS BROMELIADS. Yes. I mean, what gives with a carnivorous bromeliad? See how it's yellow-- has very little, if any, chlorophyll? Doesn't need it--it's eating bugs. I think I was told that they occur nowhere else in the world. How cool is that, to see such a rare endemic, that makes its living like no other bromeliad?

I knew these were sundews and damselflies. Whew. Good to know something, no matter how small. I just wanted to put a name on everything. Is it any wonder daughter Phoebe's middle name is Linnea, for Carolus Linnaeus?

From the air, I saw the strange golden leaves of a bizarre plant, and wondered aloud what it could be, growing in such profusion near the falls. Fortunately we were able to ground-truth the sighting with a good hike through the odd low forest around the falls. The mystery plants were tank bromeliads Brocchinia micrantha, only the world's largest bromeliad! Yeeps! They were beyond huge. Here are some people for scale. And they grow only here, at Kaieteur Falls.

But it got better. In the rainwater caught in the bromeliad's leaf junctions were tiny frogs--here's a female or juvenile. They were golden poison-dart frogs Colostethus beebei. These entrancing creatures live their entire lives in the pools in tank bromeliads--egg, tadpole, adult; egg, tadpole, adult. Amazing. Because it showered several times during our hike, I understood how they could accomplish this. The enormous slick bromeliad leaves channel the rainwater down to their bases, where it sits and accumulates all kinds of detritus along with frog tenants. This is what nourishes the plant. I watched in fascination as the leaves caught rain and ran it into their "tanks." Every plant had at least one frog, some many more. How I wished Liam and Phoebe had been along to find frogs in each plant--it would have been like an Easter egg hunt for them. But don't touch--they're highly toxic! How can something so appealing be so poisonous?

About thirty miles up the river live 500 members of the Patamona tribe. The falls is named for Chief Kai, who, legend has it, went over the falls in a canoe, sacrificing himself to the gods, to save his village from invasion. The Patamonas will likely be instrumental in any ecotourism that goes on in this undeveloped, pristine place. It was amazing to me to see such a stunning natural wonder, such a diverse ecosystem, left so unspoiled and untrammeled. There are no developed roads; you can only get there by plane. And the single accommodation near the falls is just an open shanty with a few hammocks hanging in it. You can see its red roof in this picture. No skyscrapers, no casinos, no condos...just a shanty. That made my heart sing, but I also wondered how this place would be preserved if people can't get to it to appreciate and study it, to stay there and soak up its beauty and wonder. We were on the ground floor, no, the basement of ecotourism here, looking at what might be. I felt like an early explorer beholding Yellowstone for the first time, knowing that people would want to see it, and in the next thought wondering what would become of it when they did.

Kaieteur Falls Magic

On the second day of our journey (I know...I've gotten what? eleven posts out of the first day!) we went up and away in a teeny tiny plane. A solitary sandpiper teetered at the airport, saying good bye.
Georgetown, Guyana's capital city, from the air. It is not particularly cosmopolitan, as you can see.
A leper colony, now defunct. The graveyard was on the little island in the foreground. I thought of all the suffering that had gone on there.
I could hardly take my eyes off our pilot who looked so much like Chet Baker's foster father David that I wanted to give him a hug. Well, I would have enjoyed giving him a hug even if he didn't look like David's lost twin...but enough from the Invisible Woman.

Today, we'd take a much-too- brief excursion to experience the magic of Kaieteur National Park. Designated in 1929, the park is huge--242 square miles of almost- unbroken rain forest.
When I spotted these denuded mountains from the air, I assumed they'd been deforested. Isn't most of Latin America thus scarred? But no--I was told that these are natural savannahs, formed because the soil is too thin to support trees. Amazing. Kaieteur National Park sits on the Guiana Shield, a two billion year-old bit of the earth's crust that spans 30,000 square miles between the Amazon and the Orinoco. The falls itself is the world's tallest single-drop waterfall, at a dizzying 741 feet. Our birdwatching tower on top of our house is 41 feet tall. Just add 700 more feet and you have the potential to brew up some serious acrophobia. I took this from the air, as our skilled pilot banked to give us a good view of the falls. The river just kind of pokes along, widens out and then... Yikes!We walked and walked, getting closer to the falls with each overlook.
OK, that's probably plenty close. Eeeeek. Tannins stain the water a cola-brown.
There were rainbows in the mist.
Two by intrepid two, we crawled to the edge to look down into the gorge. Here are Terry and Judy Moore.
I was fascinated by the cushiony plants on the gorge walls. A biologist once lowered himself down on ropes and spent a very cold, uncomfortable night in the gorge, collecting plants and checking out the bizarre life forms down there. I'd love to know what he found.
But I was more than content to spend my time at the top of the gorge. No ropes, thank you.