Exploring Our Purchased Land in the Amazon Rainforest

the rainforest we bought in the Ecuadorian Amazon is a beautiful and mysterious Place full of surprises which is why in this video today I want to explore the land we are trying to protect and Rew and to give all this some structure I'll be taking you from the most degraded areas to the wildest and most pristine ones where we've made some pretty exciting discoveries and as we go along we'll try to start mapping which trees we want to climb where we want to leave camera traps and of course showing you some of the amazing Wildlife that we find now let's start with the center point of our land which is of course our base so this here is the only place in the land that is currently inhabited and it's essentially the house from the

previous owner that was in relatively good condition so Freddy fixed it up and we've been using it as a base the house is simple but comfortable enough and it has space for about eight people which is great for the planning stage of the project but it'll also be quite useful in the future as we develop the project further for me the most amazing thing is all the wildlife we can see from up here on a daily basis you can see literally hundreds of birds ranging from the oropendolas that wake us up in the morning with their incredible song all the way to woodpeckers white-throated tons or even laughing Falcons oh and sometimes of course we had the chance to greet some special visitors all in all regardless of the

shape or size of the animals it's a great reminder of what we are trying to protect here and then next on the human infrastructure list we have the three roads that go through our property as well as the electrical cables that provide power to the families that live down there the roads crisscross our lands one of them is actually a community path which needs to be maintained but it seems we can reile the others which is great then a short walk down the community road we get to some more houses that belong to the families which moved to the city a few years ago the first house in this area is relatively big and is made of Good Wood and despite the termites it is actually in a decent condition so the house back

there it's might be salvageable and we might try to use it for something like tourism or volunteers we're not sure but uh yeah it's still standing so maybe we can give it some use and then there's third house here it looks like the jungle has taken this one back already I imagine how was the view you know so this one's a bit uh too far gone no Freddy yeah it's not repairable not fix no fixing this one we'll probably try to salvage some materials but otherwise this house will be returned to the jungle and the forest growing around these houses is already quite nice it is a bit more humid than the other areas because of its proxim Pro imity to a lovely Clear Water Creek and this means that there is an

abundance of amphibian such as this mushroom tonged salamander we found in the leaf litter or the iconic Ecuadorian poison dart frog which we found on the leaves and then um we have a house number four here it's yeah it's also pretty much gone termites have gotten into pretty much all of the wood we're going to apply the same principle get rid of the tin roof so it's not in the way and return everything to the Jungle together the roads the houses and the margins account for 2.1% of the land which is quite reasonable and then we have these grasses which are essentially cow pastures and in my eyes this is the worst bit of degradation in our land I mean to come in and cut the mature rainforest and replace it with

non-native grasses to then graze cows on them is the stuff of nightmares when it comes to the DeForest station of the rainforest and in our case it comes complete with a nice set of fences with a lot of bar wire in between so if the forest now grows this might get in the way for people and for animals so we're probably going to have to get rid of that the open areas made searching for Birds easier but it was also unbearable to be walking around in the baking sun instead of the deep shade of the Jungle canopy and the fences will be a bit of a head headache as well as we'll have to get rid of a few kilometers in total and either sell it or dispose of it and then we have the monoculture

cacao plantations and they're a bit better than the degraded cow pasture that you saw just now but there's still a far cry from the mature rainforest that you can see in the back there that's what all of this used to be because the mature rainforest offers a lot more it offers shelter for biodiversity and habit stat for all kinds of wildlife in total the cacao plantations and the grasses occupy 11.8% of the land and while we've enjoyed the clear view of the birds and the Unlimited Supply of fresh cacao we do want all of this to become mature rainforest once more we checked out each area with the Drone and on foot to get some proper underground data it's just a dense wall of grass and nothing else so we dug up the root of this grass to be

able to ID it better hope hopefully so we'll take some pictures of the leaves and of the roots we are just logging some observations as we walk um as we walk the land um the idea is that as we do these Trails we can take photos and uh write things down about any features we see and now just noting that here's the creek that separates the two caca plantations and what's the app that you're using so this is epic collect it's a nice and simple free app that we've been using for this and then hopefully this will all be nicely displayed on the map that we can keep uh checking back right now we are still developing the final recovery plan but for the most part we are happy to just rely on natural regeneration you see the

plantations here used to be maintained so there was no competition for the cow and there would have been cows grazing on the grass but now all of that has stopped and the jungle is just itching to take over again we're expecting that the grass will grow Too Tall dry up and eventually wilt creating an opportunity for some trees to settle once they have opportunity imagine if there is a opportunity here if you come back in one year this one probably will be like 3 m high once this Pioneer tree species settle in they will start out competing the grasses and the cacao trees and eventually we should end up with something like this area used to be a cacao Plantation a few decades ago and

now it's a proper rainforest again we'll check in on all of this and the full action plan in a few months in the last episode of this series so if you're a member keep an eye out on your account and if you're just a viewer here on YouTube be sure to subscribe to stay up to date and now it's time for us to start exploring the proper wild areas of our land starting with the forest to the South we're not undertaking this small one-day Expedition simply because we fancy a day out in the jungle don't get me wrong it is of course a ton of fun but our purpose here is to gather a baseline of the health of the natural ecosystem which is why as we go along we are marking relevant features in species

on our map and deploying our camera traps to get a rough picture of the state of the wildlife populations and for this work we'll have Adriana and Thiago our biologist Ollie our go-to Herman Julia to help with the filming Freddy who of course manages this project and crucially also so we're heading for the first proper treack in the jungle and today we have uh K who is our neighbor as our guides to show us this Trail properly for the first stage of this work we will be tracing the peninsulas of our land near the river because even though these areas are in great condition they used to be farmed so H was just saying that 30 years ago this used to be a coffee plantation here so this is before the previous owner

so two owners ago and uh as you can see it has uh yeah recovered quite nicely this is a proper Forest so hopefully our degraded areas um cacao plantations and so on will look like this in uh in 30 years time I think this is the biggest and most imposing buttress that we have here and uh oh it's big if it fills the frame and uh you can see what an amazing tree and The Roots they spread like this because the soil is so thin so they spread quite widely instead of going down cuz you know the Amazon has almost no soil the way you can think about it is essentially that the nutrients are constantly in circulation the plants and the Animals here absorb and recycle the nutrients so fast that almost nothing stays in the actual soil it is quite

poor and this forces the trees to spread their Roots out instead of growing deeper monkeys so what we're trying to do with this cam track so we just saw some monkeys which we believe to be nocturnal monkeys jumping across the branches and we weren't able to actually get a closer look and to film them so we're leaving this uh camera trap here and we'll we'll try to come back because the guys they believe that they live in that hole in that tree right there so uh hopefully we'll be able to swap them uh when we're not here making all this noise so it looks like we might have gotten lucky here and uh we found some Chestnut front at MAA on a really tall Branch up there and Yulia here a he's trying to film them

properly that was super cool to see we really got to hang out with those MA for a little bit and uh yeah just seeing them play on the branch it's actually quite hard to see birds from within the forest which is why we're lucky to still have those open areas if you will but once the forest regenerates we're going to have to be better at finding Birds and we're going to have to see them more like this so uh this is uh generally what happens in the Amazon you're uh walking about enjoying the forest and then a massive downpour comes around Waters all the plants it's nice and enjoyable to be in the rain I'm just usually stressed because of the camera here uh yeah it's what keeps these forests going and it's h it's nice to be here you know in the

middle of one of these big downpours it really feels like the rainforest what an amazing place to be protecting even if it drenches you from time to time everybody's got different tactics for the rain alley yeah staying classy I'm British after all you are British after all representing with the umbrella so now after the rain we get to see pretty sad sight so this whole area behind that's that's completely open it was uh it was cut um not too long ago and uh yeah you can really see with how much brighter it is and how few trees are standing there and this is one of those that we saw from the Drone right T yeah you can see quite well yeah we're just weren't quite sure what it looked like so this one here we have it mapped clearly yeah so

we knew about it but it's yeah it's interesting to see it of course it's one of those that we hope will recover fast once we let it grow back once the rain arrives the wildlife hides for a while but in further Explorations on this peninsula we found a lot more Wildlife including some locations where these animals go every single day such as this vitally important clay Lake but I'll Reserve that for the fourth episode in this series where we take on the task of fully mapping the wildlife that lives here including the results from all our camera traps now I want to move on to the exploration of the next Peninsula which is Wilder and an even better condition and based on the shape I

decided to call it the sock Peninsula you think people should vote on the name of the peninsulas I do think people should vote on the name of the peninsulas you don't think people are going to side with me and choose to call it sock instead of tail I'm on the sock team as well you're on the sock te I think there's going to be something D I think there's a lot more potential Peninsula M Peninsula face I think we can get more creative than just the old stinky sock I think the sock name is cemented in our brains by now but we're always open to new ideas so if you have a good one drop it in the comments and we might actually take it on right at the start of this track we were lucky to

be able to see a Spix's Guan which is a beautiful bird which we had only glimpsed on a distant Branch the day before now even though this area is in better condition it was also farmed at one point yeah they're really tall cacao trees with growing yeah with the caca growing straight out of the tree all the fruits that they're carrying monkeys will be eating you know so like a scooter monkey maybe capin or um titty monkey the one we saw the caca plantations here have been abandoned at least since 2006 when most families which live near the river moved up toward Ward the new community Road both of these peninsulas were crisscrossed by beautiful little creeks and parts of it are certainly low enough

to floods during heavy rainfall events this place felt like a wonderful playful Maze of plants and water with the Abundant variety of beautiful fungi giving it an enchanted forest look wait sorry caterpillar I think so I don't know caterpillar oh okay it's very new maybe in one more week wow it's you know so it's trying to walk its way closer to the water looking for the nutrients on the ground and so forth these walking Palms are super interesting and they immediately make me think that they're the real life version of antt a tropical tree beard if you will and the wannabe filmmaker in me really wish to make a time lapse over a few months but maybe that's a project for the future when we're not as busy figuring out these

projects thought like a tactic of being the last in the middle again you see that pretty deadly falance right there um yeah you can never be too careful walking here even our very experienced Freddy and Kime walk right over it but uh our biologist here keeping an eye out for the snakes doing security services so yeah statistically that is uh the snake with the most snake bites within its range so might not be the deadliest if you do get bit but it is the one that bites the most and kills the most within its range and its range is the Amazon rainforest so a respectable a respectable snake later on we actually found iwasa in this peninsula which is the vine that is essential for the making of the famous ritual tea that is so important for

shamanic culture and the people of the Amazon and we were also able to track down some very elusive Wildlife but for this Expedition we were starting to run a bit low on time and we've only done this and we're hoping to do all of this before it gets dark today so we got to what's time pick up the pace a little bit so it's half past 3 so three okay but thankfully there is a short guts so this here is the tiputini river and I couldn't imagine a nicer Southern border for our land this river is the only barrier between us and the Y Sun National Park and as you can see it meanders beautifully creating these nice long curves and peninsulas in our land it Wiggles about so much that we actually have almost 5 km of this River

in our land alone it takes an hour to float down all the way with the current and I think this is a particularly important part of what we are protecting here this is where Aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems meet with all sorts of Wildlife thriving here ranging from these beautiful golden mantle tamarinds to Golden igos and all the way to Strange Birds like the prehistoric looking hson or the anhinga floating down this River was an experience that truly immersed Us in the jungle especially when it started pouring down in classic Amazon fashion once more there is so much wonderful and healthy Forest right next to the river and it stands so tall and impressive above the

water but above all it was wonderful to see how much we are protecting with this relatively small investment and don't get me wrong $185,000 is of course not a small amount of money I mean I certainly cannot imagine personally having all that money and being able to do something like this but together with you our Moss Earth members we've managed to do it with just a couple of months of membership money which is simply incredible so if you're not yet a member but you would like to be a part of this and other projects that we do then please consider joining at moss. Earth the membership starts at around $65 uh similar amount in euros and we try to make it cheap because we want as many people as possible to participate

that's really important for us and when you put it all together we can do really big stuff it's rewelding by the people normal people like you and me for the people for the people that live here so that this Forest can stand for a really long time and that is why now it's time to show you the core the Wild Heart of what we are protecting the mature part of our rainforest what's really amazing to see is that there are still trees like this one left trees that are probably hundreds of years old that stand proud and tall in the jungle covered in Lanas covered in all sorts of different epip fites it's just full of life it's an ecosystem of its own it is in this area that we found all the tallest and oldest

trees in our land including some really amazing ones such as this emergence near the cacao Plantation or this one further North near the border of the land so this tree here is actually a cedar locally here it's known as a chuncho and fredd tells me that it is the uh second best tree to make Dugout canoes that essentially a tree like this one huge old tree like this could be cut and then they would make a canoe for a whole family you could put 15 people their dogs and everything they wanted to carry inside but unfortunately for us it is also a tree that is very desirable for furniture for bed making for all sorts of other uses it's a very desirable wood so it's really important for us to

protect it's really special first actually that we still have some of these trees on our land and second it's really important for us to protect him to ensure that nobody's coming in and illegally logging these and along with an older Forest comes something quite special watch this is incredible look at the Feast at the boom of Life happening and this tree over here is just completely covered in fungi and it's one of the things we are we're looking for in the mature forest and in this area here yeah we just have a lot more Deadwood then we have down near the river where the forests have been Cuts less time ago we have a lot less of this here this part of the forest is also home to a few Creeks so we set out to walk one of them to see what we could

find sorry the lady wanted to dig this up yes without any permission you know so taking bringing here a big machines and dig out and destroying the forest looking for that was my like I was very worried about that you know like I was very sad and then you know like uh can you imagine opening this they will dig maybe 30 m wide here not only this little creek they will dig like 20 30 m wide and then they never close once they get the gold they will go away never come back yeah and leave a mess behind yes you're lucky this was one of the reasons we felt a certain degree of urgency to buy this land because imagining this beautiful place turned into a horrible mud pit makes me really sad you're looking you're looking for Gold Freddy

yes uh maybe not don't find it maybe you know it's good maybe not I don't want to tell people it's this no gold here no gold just rocks and mud just and a lot of snakes is what we have to tell them yeah and just as we said that we of course stumbled upon another Fair delance that's pretty poisonous snake along with some lovely amphibians some crabs and even some fish so now we've reached a river that actually runs through our property a little bit but it only sort of meanders in and then it goes out into the other areas that are adjacent to our property but it's really cool and it's a lot bigger than I thought this was once more a beautiful stretch of riparian habitats completely

untouched with all sorts of different plants taking advantage of the extra water and humidity and once again it was really refreshing to bathe here and contemplate this place but when you stay for too long the jungle starts taking you in so this is thiago's bag and uh and this is what happens that's terides when you leave the bag in the wrong place in the jungle uh you know later if you live maybe one day tomorrow you can see there my Nest over total oh no yes I really like my bag so I hope you've enjoyed this tour of the land and if you'd like to support this project and all our other projects then please remember that the best way to do so is by becoming a Mossy Earth member and you can do so at moss. Earth

the link will be in the description and also in a pin comment down below and I decided to finish the tour here next to this amazing tall Sandy Tree because in the next video we're going to climb it we're going to climb this one and many others to show you what life is like up there until next time cheers