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Instituto de Investigación Biológica de las Cordilleras Orientales
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Pacuyacu cave exploring expedition
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|  | The Pacuyacu cave in the South spur of the Cordillera del Condor is possibly one of the biggest cave systems in Peru (or South America?) and totally unexplored. A colleague made his thesis on OIL Birds (Guacharos) in this cave entrance and his pictures are uploaded soon. Guacharos are ancient night birds, feeding highly specialized on palm fruits. They fly long distances by night to their feeding places (how do they orient? magnetic fields?) and hide and breed in dark caverns all along the East Andes and oriental cordilleras. There are also mysterious migrations of those birds observed and we need more studies with ringed Oil birds to detect their action radius around one home cave.
The parents build in the caves cones of mud with a dish top, where they put their eggs in and incubate them. Since ancient times, the natives and now also the settlers of those ranges hunt and harvest such exceptional birds and in the case of the Pacuyacu cave- an overharvesting might took place currently, which we try to control in the future by establishing a protection time during the main preproduction season where hunting will be forbidden, also extraction of young birds and eggs.
There is an impact observed, if tourists enters such caves and disturb those birds and their nesting places: at Cajamarca, San Martin, similar but smaller caves lost all their oil birds because of disturbance and hunting and we do not want to repeat this error! |
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