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Obviously the rainforest is packed full of creatures but I will try just to give an overview of some of the creatures of the rainforest using the pictures I have taken. |
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The Squirrel Monkey is a common and fun little character. They gather in large groups and can often be found foraging with one of the other monkey species such as the Capuchins, Woolly’s or Spider monkeys. They are acrobatic creatures with prehensile tails and this little character in the photo is attempting to grab my camera. |
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Tapirs are more uncommon but they have a characteristic footprint that we found several times in the forest. We visited a “colpa” or salt lick that was frequented by a variety of mammals. We saw where monkeys had climbed down trees to lick at the nutrient rich clay but more importantly we saw a lot of Tapir tracks. |
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The Capybara is a funny looking creature as the world’s largest rodent and that hair is really coarse. They are actually very water wise and spend a lot of time eating aquatic plants. They are strong swimmers and will quite happily swim across the rivers trying to avoid the caiman (South American Crocodiles) |
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The Spotted Puffbird pictured here is one of the many diverse birds that we came across whilst we were in the rainforest. It is a bird that lives in the lower and middle canopy and therefore is one of the more difficult species to spot and when you add to that the fact that it had only ever been recorded twice before in Ecuador you start to understand why we were so pleased to see it. And we saw it on several separate occasions. I took this picture on the first occasion before we knew how important it was. It was a very unusual bird in that it allowed you to approach very close to it and this photo was taken from a distance of only five or six feet. |
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We saw a large number of parrot species when we were in the rainforest, but I photographed this individual at an animal sanctuary that we visited. This is a blue headed Amazon parrot. |
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The rainforest was also full of a diverse range of other creatures. A few of these are shown here.  
 
 
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