Life List by Olivia Gentile

Author:Olivia Gentile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

In spite of how excited she’d been about her trip to the Manu reserve in Peru—her first trip after the hysterectomy—she didn’t end up having a good time.

In a different frame of mind, she would have found the reserve, which had just opened to tourists, utterly staggering: it’s in a part of the Amazon rain forest so pristine and remote that it takes a whole day to get there, via small plane and boat, and it’s home to monkeys, jaguars, and more than a thousand species of bird—about one in ten of the birds on the planet. But Phoebe came home feeling that her time there had been a missed opportunity. For one thing, “the weather was unbelievably cold . . . & this kept down bird activity and song,” she wrote to Doris. Otherwise, she thought, the fault lay with the tour company, Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, and the guide, Steve Hilty, a well-known expert on South American birds. The company had booked the group on “what they know to be [an] unreliable small plane flight to get us there,” and when the flight got canceled, they had to drive, “losing us two critical days.” In the park, they stayed in comfort in a lodge instead of camping, forgoing “the better birding opportunities upstream.” Steve, who had recently published a field guide to the birds of Colombia, was “surprisingly unfamiliar with many Peruvian birds, I thought, & really hadn’t done his homework at all. I knew a lot of the species before he did.” She also thought he’d been too focused on pointing out monkeys and big, colorful birds like macaws, most of which she’d already seen, at the expense of the little brown and black birds that would have been lifers for her. “We missed some important habitats & species . . . but I was the only one aware of it.” She said she would go back to the Manu soon, but with Field Guides, “who have learned quickly how to plan a sensible, bird-oriented itinerary” for the park.

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