This is one of my favorite photos from the trip. Summer and I spent three weeks in Peru, visiting the major sites around Cusco and spending three days in Lima (unintentionally - more on that later). We also spent five days in Peru´s part of the Amazon rainforest, near the great natural reserve of Parque Manu.
Early one morning we visited a macaw clay lick. Macaws are wonderful birds, highly intelligent, big, raucous, long-lived, and often fond of people. They make good pets - so good that the pet trade is the biggest threat to their existence in the wild, along with habitat destruction. As they become more rare the problem gets worse. Prices go up, attracting more trappers. The red-and-green macaws seen above are safe for now, but that is thanks in part to a captive breeding program.
Macaws eat clay because it trace elements that they need and because a lining of clay in their stomachs helps them to digest food that would otherwise be poisonous. But it is dangerous for them to descend from the canopy where they spend most of their time to the handful of river banks where the composition of clay is just right. Here they are exposed, vulnerable to predators like eagles, jaguars, and humans.
We had to wait three hours to get this picture, while hundreds of macaws gathered in the trees above. They flew reconnaissance missions, swooping down in ones and twos to check for threats. A gust of wind, the sound of a twig breaking, at one point a single red squirrel sent them back to the safety of the treetops.
When they did finally come down, we only had our point-and-shoot cameras, the Casio Exilims that we´ve used for every photo on this trip. But the macaws were about 200 feet from our hide. So this picture was shot through one lens of a pair of binoculars carried by our guide José Antonio. He and I took a few dozen shots each and this one, which he took, was the only shot that worked. Thank you José.