tomarbour's Favorites

'Sleeping beauty'

Resting in a depression on a large vine (lliana) along the trail. It is here for hours, until the rain poured.

Inasmuch as its venom is lethal, the viper is quite vulnerable in this passive state - can easily be picked up and killed by locals, especially for food in this region. In fact, this viper species, like the gaboon, is a popular animal protein source.
Being found behind, or beyond the cutline of the forest reserve determines survival - life, or death for the spectacular wildlife.

Tortoise bones in the bottom of a sinkhole, found by Tim Rochester and Bill Baker (in photo) a few days earlier than the day I took this photo--way back in 1984. The DeRoy family, who had lived in Puerto Ayora and explored the islands for decades, were unaware of the sinkhole's existence. I'm not sure exactly where this sinkhole was located, but in my journal I wrote "we rode a truck...toward Camote, in the highlands east of Bellavista. Hiked toward and beyond the mountain." I believe it was somewhere east of Pintudo and Cerro Crocker, and northeast of Media Luna, which we hiked to the a few hours later. We also stumbled across the entrance to a large lava tube cave nearby (see second photo of slope above entrance) with some unidentified animal bones, which may provide a clue about the location of this sinkhole. We never saw any living tortoises in the area, where they had been extirpated, despite several days exploring the area, so I assume the bones were years or decades old. A few weeks later I met David Steadman at the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington DC, and gave him a map with the approximate location of the sinkhole and lave tube cave, but I don't think he ever went there to search for bones. I would love to know if anybody else has been to this sinkhole and if the tortoise bones have ever been studied and identified to species. I'm pretty sure the bones belong to C. donfaustoi, based on the map in this article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0138779

Comenzaba a cruzar la carretera, por poco la atropellamos pero la esquivamos y nos detuvimos para quitarla del camino
She was starting to cross the road, we almost ran over her but we dodged her and stopped to get her out of the way