Wildlife in Peru: Manu Biosphere Reserve, Wildlife Center

The early morning mist curled around the edges of the gravel road as we walked in the dark to the wildlife blind. Having arrived late the night before at the Cock of the Rock Lodge in Peru’s Manu cloud forest, I hadn’t yet seen the surroundings in the daylight, but my flashlight illuminated small puzzle pieces of the verdant forest. Suddenly, I heard screeching up ahead.

“Do you hear that?” our guide, Julian, whispered, as the sound got louder.

“Monkeys?” I asked.

“That’s the Andean cock-of-the-rock,” he replied.

• The Andean cock-of-the-rock, Peru’s national bird, is found in the cloud forest.
• Robert Szajkowski

The noisy squawk was something far different than the call I’d imagined the red-pompadoured bird would make. Just minutes from the lodge, the concealed shelter allowed us access to a lek (mating display grounds) for Peru’s national bird, and sitting quietly, we witnessed the elaborate dance of 12 brilliantly colored males competing for the affections of three drab brown females.

We sat, spellbound, for more than an hour. Just as the scarlet birds disappeared into the forest, a group of wooly monkeys crashed through the branches and crossed overhead. Welcome to the jungle, indeed.

From Cusco to Cloud Forest

The Manu Biosphere Reserve is believed to have the highest concentration of bird species in the world, with 1,000—one out of every nine on Earth. The six-day Biotrip, which runs from Andean highlands to riverside rain forest, was arranged by Tropical Nature Travel, the travel arm of the Tropical Nature conservation system. Together in a van, my husband and I, our guide and a driver started out from Cusco. We passed through the altiplano and climbed over Andean mountain chains of 13,000 feet. In the high plateaus, we visited chullpas, pre-Incan burial chambers, before plunging down into patches of elfin forest and then to the cloud forest itself.

• Guest bungalows at Manu Wildlife Center in Peru.
• Courtesy of InkaNatura Travel

In the two days at Cock of the Rock Lodge (which supports a 12,500-acre forest reserve here in the Kosñipata Valley), we stayed in comfortable private bungalows, had meals and snacks at the lodge with other guests, and went on three to four hikes a day. Because the animal residents are most active at twilight and dusk, those were important hikes on our schedule. Julian allowed us to choose any amount of leisure time during the day, mixed with hikes in the surrounding area to spot more animals.

Although we were just beginning the Biotrip and hadn’t yet gotten to the lowland rain forest, we had no trouble starting to assemble a jaw-dropping list of birds we’d seen, from the cock -of-the-rock to quetzals, toucanets, motmots, flycatchers, tanagers and wrens. The list would only grow larger as we descended to the river valley.

Manu Wildlife Center

Our voyage into Manu’s lowland rain forest took us past clear waterfalls that rushed down the mountains and coca plantations where we tasted bitter coca leaves. At the small riverside town of Atalaya, we boarded our boat for the six-hour journey along the Alto Madre de Dios and Madre de Dios rivers to the Manu Wildlife Center.

The Wildlife Center is considered by many to be the best place in Peru to view Amazonian wildlife. Its 22 private bungalows and community lodge with a dining room and bar made our four-night stay incredibly comfortable. Even though the bungalow showers have hot water, I never turned the temperature higher than what I needed to cool down from the steamy jungle hikes. And every meal in the dining room was a tasty mix of Peruvian (from ceviche to potatoes in spicy cheese sauce) and international cuisine. At the end of the day, a chilled Cusqueña beer was the perfect refreshment to top off our activities.

• A capybara feeding her young.
• Flavia Bottazzini

Wealth of Wildlife

While the creature comforts of the Manu Wildlife Center kept us from roughing it, the best thing about this area is the immense wealth of wildlife viewing possibilities. Julian and his breadth of experience was essential to our many daily hikes. Besides telling us about what we could easily see, he would identify a bird by its song and track the sound so we could see where the bird was resting, or plunge his hand into a mass of leaves and come out with a poison-dart frog after only hearing its chirp.

We woke daily between 4 and 5 a.m. Often there was time only to grab coffee and a quick breakfast before we were off into the jungle or on a boat down the river to a canopy platform or wildlife blind. After getting used to early waking hours in the cloud forest, it wasn’t too difficult to jump up in the dark, ready to go after Julian woke us each morning.

Traveling by boat to different sites was an integral part of the wildlife experience. One morning, we happened upon a female and two baby capybara. Further down the river, a caiman sunned itself on the bank. And cliffs of clay served as essential concentrations of mineral treats for more than a dozen parrot species.

Night hikes afforded us views of multitudes of frogs, spiders, bats and the possibility of seeing the elusive jaguar. While other groups saw rainbow boas and vine snakes, the only serpent we came across during the entire Biotrip was a young fer-de-lance along the road after we left the cloud forest. If the idea of stumbling on a snake is keeping you away from the jungle, don’t let it. You’d be missing far too much.