Night on the Essequibo (Iwokrama, part 3)

It was like a scene out of a bad B-movie. As soon as we rounded the bend away from the Iwokrama Field Center and were swallowed in the impenetrable dark of the moonless night, the motorboat sputtered and died. The guides tried in vain to get it started again, to no avail. Do you have a radio to call for help, we asked. "We used to," said Lawrence. "But we stopped bringing them, because they don't work anyway."

We became quiet and meek, afraid to ask any more questions. Questions like, "When was the last time a caiman jumped into a boat and ate someone?" "Has an anaconda ever toppled over a boat?" "Are there piranhas in the water?"* And have I mentioned that the point of this nighttime ride was so we can watch the big animals hunting at night?

We got the paddles out, but the current swept us to the middle of the river, in sight again of the field center's watchtower. Lawrence flashed a light, hoping that someone in the watchtower was, um, watching. In the meantime, the boat captain still tried to yank the motor back to life. I clutched a paddle, thinking that I could give any hunting creatures a swift whack to the head before they started chewing on my leg.

Eventually, the motor started up again, and the captain drove us into the swampy edges of the forest. Lawrence had a powerful searchlight trained onto the water. The way to spot night creatures was to look for the telltale red dots that their eyes became when a light shines directly onto them. It also served to blind them enough so that we could creep closer without startling them and causing them to flee.

For a glorious couple of hours, we pretended we were part of a National Geographic documentary, during which we were able to spot:

A spectacled caiman. A baby that was about four to five feet long, it wasn't as scary as the nine-footer we spotted earlier in the day. Not scary at all, actually, to everyone but Cookee, who yelled comedically and dove into the back of the boat when the guide released it from its spotlighted trance and it thrashed away to safety.

El chupacabra! Aieeeee!! You might know the infamous Chupacabra ("goatsucker") as that mythological creature who sucks the guts out of goats, but this one is also called "goatsucker" in the mistaken belief that it suckles from goats. The more common name for it is the nightjar.

A tree boa! AAAAAAHHHH!!!! I hate snakes! It was my turn to edge away uncomfortably from the edge of the boat. Lawrence says that he's been bitten by one of these, and it hurts like crazy, but since they're not poisonous, there's nothing to worry about. These things are, as you know, constrictors that squeeze their prey to death. Before swallowing them whole. It's the stuff of nightmares. (All this is scarier when you don't know that this is but a baby tree boa, not longer than two or three feet. He was uncomfortable on this tree branch, clutched tight around the branches.)

And then, before we returned to our cabins at the field station, we saw this. Really, we did! That voice you hear narrating the thing is Kristan's, while the rest of us were on the string section.


Jaguar Vs Anaconda. Battle To The Death. -


*the answers to these questions, for those who are curious, are Never, Never, and Yes.