BirdNote: When the Amazon Floods
Air Date: August 03, 2018
Floods can be devastating and destructive, but in the Amazon, as Mary McCann notes, annual floods are vital for many exotic bird species.
Transcript
MUSIC: BIRDNOTE® THEME
CURWOOD: Floods can devastate the built environment. But as Mary McCann explains in today's BirdNote®, for the vast Amazon rain forest and its creatures, flooding is a different experience.
BIRDNOTE®/ WHEN THE AMAZON FLOODS
MCCANN: To us humans, flooding can often seem like an unmitigated catastrophe. In the right circumstances, though, when it’s predictable and wildlife is well adapted, flooding can create a biological bonanza.
In the Amazon River Basin, annual heavy rains can raise water levels 30 to 40 feet in just days. The basin is almost flat, sloping just one inch per mile over its eastward flow to the Atlantic, a journey of some 2,000 miles. So, when the rain arrives, forests flood, and a massive push of sediment erects new islands almost overnight.
It’s a lush world that scientists and nature travelers explore by boat, where some of the world’s most iconic birds find fruit in the trees or perch at the water’s edge.
Toucans and macaws, tiny pygmy kingfishers, tiger-herons, and massive ringed kingfishers.
Oropendolas sing a startling refrain.
These birds are part of the richest array of life on earth, an extraordinary mosaic of habitats, all intricately linked. And all dependent on the river system that holds one-fifth of all the world’s fresh water.
I’m Mary McCann.
CURWOOD: Swoop on over to our website, loe dot org, for some pictures.
