This pheasant-sized bird is quite the character in the rain forests of South America. A bit ungainly and almost geeky looking, but also with some attractive coloring around the face. Hoatzins are also called stink birds. Unique among birds, their diet consists solely of leaves and this is what causes the cow-manure like smell that they emit. I liked the way that this guy was framed by all that foliage. The photo was taken in Madidi National Park in Bolivia.
This is a special Sunday edition of the photo of the day in honor of my sister Mo’s birthday. She likes frogs. This one is called a polka dot tree frog and it was photographed in Madidi National Park in the Bolivian Amazon.
Continuing with the eye theme to round out the week, this is a green parrot snake that appears to have lost an eye. All three photos are of the same snake. The top photo shows the snake’s injured right eye — a solid black color. In the second photo you see the right eye, the normal yellow color. The third photo shows both eyes. Messed up eye or not, the green parrot snake is most certainly one of the finest looking serpents around — not to mention harmlessly non-venomous.
This little guy is a mouse opossum I came across one night in the Pampas region of Bolivia. As the name implies, they aren’t much bigger than a mouse, but they are marsupials and not rodents. There are 55 different species of mouse opossum living in Central and South America and they are all nocturnal.
This little guy is called a spot flanked poison dart frog. The photograph was taken in Madidi National Park in the Bolivian Amazon. This is a very small frog and I needed my macro setup to get the shot. Other than the name, I really don’t know too much about this frog and not much is written about them online.
When the sun is low in the sky and there’s plenty of forest reflecting off the surface of the water, you can really get some interesting colors. This spectacled caiman was photographed late in the day on Lake Chalalan in Madidi National Park in Bolivia. Spectacled caiman can live in either salt or fresh water and because of their adaptability, are the most common of all the crocodilian species.
This night monkey seems to be enjoying his mango. Night monkeys are the only truly nocturnal monkey. I photographed this one in the Pampas region of Bolivia one night after dinner. The interesting thing about these guys is that they are susceptible to the same strain of malaria that humans are and are therefore used in medical research.
Here’s an old one that I decided to send again after watching the primates episode of “Life” last night on Discovery Channel. This is a tufted capuchin monkey, also known as a brown capuchin, from Madidi National Park in Bolivia. Capuchins are generally considered to be the most intelligent of the new world monkeys and are especially noted for their use of tools. If you saw the episode, you’d have seen one of these guys cracking open palm nuts by using a rock as a hammer and a larger flat stone as an anvil.
I had seen and photographed black howler monkeys before in Central and South America. This red howler is a sub species found only in the north western Amazon basin. I was in a canoe on Lake Chalalan and the light was fading fast when a troop of red howlers came to an area along the lake to sleep for the night. This guy was the alpha male of the troop and a couple of seconds after this shot was taken he was asleep in the V of the tree.
This is a green parrot snake from Madidi National Park in the Amazonian region of Bolivia. I was just outside the lodge when I saw this guy moving around in a pile of leaves. There were a couple of other people around and the snake raised up into this defensive pose and started looking around from one person to the other, freezing for seconds at a time with its mouth open. This gave me several opportunities to get slow shutter speed exposures in the dim light (this one was at 1/30 of a second handheld with my 200-400 vibration reduction lens).
