Amazon Wildlife Top Ten: #9

9: The Pygmy Marmoset. They are smallest of all the monkeys in the Amazon region. These ingenious little monkeys dig a small hole in a tree’s bark, where they feed on sap and resins, returning to the same “lunch counter,” every day. These are New World monkeys, native to the rainforest canopies of eastern Peru. They are among the world’s smallest primates, and are actually the smallest true monkeys, being only between 5.5 to 6.3 inches long (not counting their very long tails). Females weigh a mere 4.2 ounces, while males can go as high as 4.9 ounces.

Photo by Malene Thyssen

Amazon Wildlife Top Ten: #10

1O: The Night Monkey. These small jungle animals sleep all day, hidden in hollow trees, and come out and roam, looking for food – typically insects and fruit – under cover of darkness. They are actually the only nocturnal monkeys in the Amazon, with large brown eyes that enable them to see well at night. You can hear their grunts and screams and trills when you are out on the Aqua Expeditions skiffs after dark. The night monkeys live in family groups: mom, dad, and young ones.

Photograph courtesy of The Wildlife Conservation Society

Amazon Wildlife “Top Ten”

This past week The New York Times featured a super article on one of the most popular pastimes in the world: birding (in Peru)!  

The piece, written by Dave Sherwood, was all about ‘Birding Along the Cloud Forests’ and spoke about the hundreds – and even thousands – of birds visible in Peru. The article mostly speaks of avian life outside the Amazon…so what about the rest?!

To share some of the birds they missed, we decided to ask our guide Juan Tejanda, born and raised in Iquitos, to give us his “Top Ten” of the Amazon; but we made it a little harder for him and asked him to include ALL the wildlife in the Amazon and not just birds!Over the next couple of weeks we will be sharing his answers. Simply visit us here and be prepared to add a thing or two to your “bucket list.”