Feliz Natal / Happy Christmas!!

Why did the sloth cross the road?

A good question, as sloths are not really compatible with motor transport. Nonetheless this one decided to go where no sloths had gone before, and started to cross a busy road in the hills above Vitoria. Ten minutes later he was still there, making painfully slow, but determined, progress with now an audience from the cars and lorries who had stopped to let him pass.

TVGazetta 14 Dec 2010

He, or indeed she, it's hard to tell with sloths, appears to be a Maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus) found especially in the Atlantic forest, from Rio to Bahia and one of six types of sloth in South America. Maned sloths have very little muscle mass for their size, which saves weight when hanging from branches, but it does mean they can hardly stand on the ground, let alone walk. Their only means of locomotion is to slowly drag themselves along (if attacked they stop completely and lash out with their claws, which can be surprisingly effective).


But why exactly are sloths so slow? They are very, very, specialised in what they eat, concentrating on leaves of forest trees, especially Cecropia, a common pioneer related to nettles. This has pros and cons. The pros are that leaves are very abundant and easy to catch, the cons that, well, leaves are rubbish as a food. That's why so few animals eat them. There is very little nutrition or energy there, and what there is is extremely hard to digest. Even sloths, with specialised stomachs full of plant digesting bacteria can take up to a month to digest their food so that as much as two thirds of a sloths body weight can be just it´s stomach contents. With very little energy to spare, sloths save all they can. They have very low metabolic rates, and low body temperatures. Mostly they just hang in trees, using special hooked claws so that even this doesn´t take much effort.

Sloths seem to only leave the tree tops for two reasons. Firstly to defaecate, which they do one a week, usually in the same place. Quite why they do this isn´t exactly clear, though the smell might help to attract a mate, otherwise a bit of a problem for an animal that normally hardly moves. Which brings us to the second reason, and maybe the answer to our question. Why did the sloth cross the road? To find another sloth!

Beware the wings of Summer!

Christmas is coming

Bruxas in the flat
please put the aircon on
and squash the mossies flat

Summer is coming to the Mata Atlantica, which means hot days and nights, and rain - perfect conditions for insects. This, not Halloween, is the time for witches, "bruxas", huge (up to 16cm) moths the size of bats who invade your house at night. As I mentioned in a previous blog, bruxas, (Ascalapha odorata) are of course completely harmless, if occasionally annoying, and they feed on rotten fruit. They'll probably be around until January.

Bruxas might be harmless, but other summer visitors not so much. Termites ("cupims") swarm at this time of year, males and females abandoning their nests and flying out into the sky. They are weak fliers, and blown hither and thither by the wind. When they land they shed their wings and, if they are lucky, start to make a nest from the wet trees and timber they have landed on, so if you see discarded insect wings on your furniature, watch out! Mated queens produce huge quantities of workers that build the nest where they will all live, either underground, in mounds in the pampas or fields, or as nests on the side of trees and fence posts.


As many house holders have found to their cost, termites are very good at digesting wood, which is beyond most creatures. Although some can actually do this by themselves, most have colonies of microbes in their gut who do the work for them. Humans though are having their revenge. Firstly, termites are edible and easily caught when swarming. Apparently they are best lightly grilled on a hot plate, their natural oils supplying the cooking fat. Secondly, they are potentially a source of fuel - producing hydrogen from waste wood, although nobody has quite made a termite power station yet.

And worst of all are the mosquitoes, their life cycles speeded up by the heat, and with plenty of puddles to lay their eggs. Development time for Aedes aegypti, from egg to adult, goes from 33 days at 16C to 9 days at 32, although if it's any consolation they do die younger. With more mosquitoes comes more disease, the incidence of Dengue fever for example starts to rise steeply in December before peaking in March to May.

So beware, the time of the insects is coming!

A really good cup of coffee

A fresh cup of Jacu coffee

First pick your coffee berries, and this is where your problems start as berries on a plant ripen at different rates. It is possible to use green, unripe, berries, but the resulting coffee is more bitter and lacks the mellow taste and aromatic aroma of ripe, red berries. The problem of course is that selecting only ripe berries is very labour intensive and cannot be mechanised, but for the best quality coffee that's what you have to do. Well..., normally. In Malaysia, "kopi luwak" or civet coffee, is produced from berries that have passed through the local palm civet, a type of cat, producing an aromatic coffee which is one of the most expensive in the world. One grower in Espirito santo has improved on this idea.

Native to the forests of the area are two type of"Jacu", seed eating birds about the size of chickens - the Rusty-margined Guan (Penelope superciliaris) and Dusky-legged Guan (P. obscura). Jacu are very selective in their feeding, only picking ripe berries, which in due course pass through the bird. Thus if you collect the droppings from a Jacu, you should have only ripe berries. It sounds bizarre, but Jacu coffee has regularly won prizes and is one of the most highly prized coffees in the world. I can testify that it makes a very mild, delicious brew.


Most coffee however is made without the aid of Jacus. After picking there are more or less two options, the wet and dry methods. Most of Brazil uses the dry method. Harvested berries are cleaned and debris and damaged berries removed, sometimes by passing through a flotation channel where the ripe berries will sink and the damaged ones float away. Ripe fruit are then spread out to dry, turning regularly to give even drying and avoid mildew. In many old manor farms in Brazil you can still see the large brick area where this took place.

Fazenda Santa Maria, Sao Carlos

This stage is very important in the final taste of the coffee and traditionally drying took about 4 weeks to reach the right stage - too dry and the beans become brittle and don't handle well later, too wet and they are prone to rot. Nowadays, many plantations use machine drying to give a more controlled result.

Quero quero (Vanellus chilensis) on drying coffee berries

Dried fruit are then send to a mill to remove all the remaining fruit residue, leaving just the coffee bean. Sometimes the beans are then aged, potentially for up to 8 years, but most experts seem to agree that flavour peaks at about a year after harvest. The last important stage is roasting, which normally takes place in a rotating drum heated from below to between 180 and 280 C. Coffee with delicate flavours are only roasted for a few minutes, but roasting itself endows a strong flavour which is also popular. Beans are then cooled (air cooling is much better than water) and then the last stage is grinding, which for optimum flavour should take place just before use.
Enjoy!

Coffee

One of my favourite things.
Amongst the commonest plants in the Mata Atlantica region nowadays is the coffee bush. It has been like this for centuries, in the old days local magnates ruled over huge plantations in the states of Sao Paulo, Minas and Espirito santo. A characteristically colourful description of one such estate by Rudyard Kipling can be found here.....

www.kipling.org.uk/braz_five.htm


Coffee appears to be native to the Ethiopian highlands, but it was soon spread through the arabic world, where it was used to make "kahveh". A taste for coffee developed fairly late in the west, but when it did demand exploded, with Coffee houses such Lloyds in London becoming very popular. Lloyds incidentally was near the Thames and so a popular haunt of sailors and shipping investors, from this grew the famous shipping insurers, Lloyds of London. Anyway, increasing demand led to plantations in various colonies, for the British, India and Sri Lanka, for the Dutch Java, and for the Portuguese, Brazil.


Coffee plants are evergreen shrubs, with dark glossy leaves. There are two main types, Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora var robusta, which give arabica and robusta coffee respectively. By far the better quality comes from Coffea arabica, but it requires conditions similar to those of it's Ethiopian ancestors, high slopes above 600m, as well as being vulnerable to disease. In contrast, robusta is, well, robust, being very disease resistant as well as able to grow even down to sea level and having 40-50% more caffeine. The tradeoff is that the quality is not so good, very bitter, and it is mainly used for instant coffee which doesn't command such a high premium.


Coffee plants grow for about 5 years before producing any berries, from which coffee is made, although they will fruit for another 15 years after that. Because of this they are often intercropped with short lived species in the early years, such as banana. There are varieties of coffee like any other crop, but it seems that the soil and growing conditions are more important. Not surprising when you realise that over 800 different compounds contribute to the taste and flavour of coffee and the proportions of these vary with how and where the plant is grown. And with how the berries are prepared, but I will talk about that another day.

Snowy egrets

Snowy egrets (Egretta thula) are small herons found throughout the Americas, from the Great Lakes to Argentina. The first problem is to distinguish them from the very similar Great and Cattle egrets. Seen as photos they look almost identical, but Snowy egrets have black bills and legs with yellow feet whilst Cattle egrets have yellow bills and grey legs. It's also a question of habitat as Cattle egrets follow cattle in pasture, snapping up disturbed invertebrates, whilst Snowys feed by water. Great egrets also feed in water, but they are quite a lot bigger, up to a metre in height as well as having yellow bills.

A Snowy egret in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, ES, Brazil

Snowys are fairly sociable and will commonly flock with other "heron types" throughout their range. In the Mata Atlantica, for example, they can be found with Little Blue herons, and Great egrets as well as others. Although the group may appear to all mixed together they're probably after different foods - a study in mangrove swamps found Snowys to mainly eat shrimps and guppies while Little Blues ate crabs. Having said that, predation of fish farms in the US is equally effective by both! Snowys and Greats separate by depth, Snowys sticking to shallow water - they hate swimming! When they were observed swimming in a pond in Florida, apparently tempted by lots of prey fish, it made the wildlife press.

A Snowy egret and Little Blue heron

They hunt by plodding around in shallow water, catching whatever moves, though as mentioned above they will raid fish farms given half a chance. At night they roost in colonies with other herons on wooden platforms built in the tree tops. Snowys used to be quite endangered from hunters after their feathers for hats, but nowadays they are protected and flourishing.

Sounds of the Forest

Walk through the Mata Atlantica and you will be aware of the wild life around you, the birds, monkeys and insects, by sound more than sight. Calls to warn of intruders, defend their territory, or find a mate. Mankind, being of an inventive and devious nature, has long used this to his own ends. The Puri indians, one of the tribes inhabiting the Brazilian state of Espirito santo when the Portuguese arrived, used wooden whistles to attract birds and monkeys to the pot, and were adept at imitating the calls, or even the sequence of calls as two birds get closer to each other.

At the start of the 1920s a local amateur hunter, Maurilio Coelho, encountered these Indians when working in his day job for the electricity company, and got to know them well. They taught him how to make various whistles, and as importntly, how to use them. The whistles he then made were so successful that in 1903 he openned a factory in the city of Cachoeiro de Itapemirim and people came from miles way, even distant Rio, to buy. Business plummeted when hunting was prohibited, but one of Maurilio's grandsons is continuing to make the whistles, one of which can be seen above, and is renovating the factory and reopenning it as a tourist attraction.

www.piocoelho.com.br/

The best wood apparently comes from the Ipe tree, a catchall term for several members of the Tabebuia genus. These are large shrubs or trees noted for their durable and insect resistant wood, which makes good decking, and whistles. Finding them is not a problem as at this time of year they are bedecked with clusters of large yellow flowers and are visible from miles away even in dense forest.