We visited a manatee rescue centre today to recce for a shoot we are going to do later in the week. It is an absolutely wonderful place and I’m glad we are going to be filming there. The highlight of the visit for me had to be bottle feeding a juvenile manatee. They are such remarkable creatures – think underwater elephants – and seeing them this close up is extremely rare as they are sadly on the verge of becoming extinct.

We took a boat to Molly’s shelter today. And the boat was called Nathan. Probably the best name you could give to anything…
 

Marc the producer had to sort things out with a boat this morning so Simon, Molly, Nathan (aka Lupe) and I were left to our own devices to sort out the days events. After a humbling lesson in strength whereby a Peruvian boatman lifted my 40kg bag onto his shoulder with one hand, we headed over to an animal orphanage run by Gudren – an immensley likeable but slightly crazy Austrian. Gudren started out by setting up a butterfly farm with the idea of exporting rare and exotic butterflies around the world. Due to some slightly detailed Peruvian export legislation, this didn’t quite pan out as expected so with an inate love of animals and the Amazon, Gudren took it up on herself to take in the animals rescued from the illegal trade in endangered and exotic animals. She releases as many as she can back into the wild and her home is an idyllic cluster of wooden buildings, set amongst towering trees and thick Amazon vegetation. A large variety of rescued monkeys – many endangered species and all exotically coloured, swooped overhead as we got the grand tour and introductions to some of the more familar residents.
 

 

It was a fantastic day and I´m sold on the great work Gudren does. She just cracks on with little outside support and is utterly fearless in her defence of the animals. I did a couple of ops to help out – removed a mass from a Macaws wing and extracted a couple of teeth from a monkey – which went well. The Macaw was a handful and it gave Gudren a nasty bite which she took without complaint (last year one of the Macaws fell into her lake and was attacked by the resident 2m caimans – Gudren jumped in to rescue it regardless of the danger – so not a lot phases her).
 

The really big deal about today though, wasn´t the giant anteater, the jaguar or treating the wound on the tapir – but the fact that Nathan declared he needed an assistant. Suddenly he had been promoted from soundman to director/producer and it was a lot of work for him. Especially because he had to carry a lot of stuff as well. Simon and I promised to petition Marc for his cause so fingers crossed…
 

There is going to be some radio silence for awhile as we are about to hit the waters for a few days and visit some communities upstream – will update in a little while.

From a producer’s or director’s point of view, it’s great to have a team that you can leave filming on their own and I don’t have to worry about them missing something that is essential to cover a story. We are planning to go on a kind of house-boat tomorrow to travel up the Amazon deeper into the rainforest to help some isolated communities with their animal problems. But today I found out that the boat company didn’t receive the money that we transferred to its parent company in the USA quite a while ago. We desperately needed to stock up food and petrol, so I stayed behind to sort this out while the rest of the crew visited an animal orphanage run by Gudrun, a German ex-pat.

I had to resort to our cash-float for now to get the boat ready for tomorrow’s departure and will have to sort out the money issue once we are back. The crew did a fantastic job out at Gudrun’s animal orphanage and while Nathan took over as producer/director everyone chipped in and it sounds like they covered some great stories.

One of the most annoying things about being on a shoot is the variety of workload in your day. At one moment you can be worked like a dog and the next you are sitting around waiting for something to happen, twiddling your thumbs like a bum in central park. There is no middle road – it is all to the extremes. And today was a case in point as we spent the morning waiting to see if an owner of sick dog would turn up. Eventually he did and then it was all go as we stormed in to film what Marc (the producer) said would be “a quick operation” after the long day of filming yesterday (we visited a place called the Butterfly Farm and it was absolutely brilliant – I fulfilled one of my life dreams to touch a sloth. It was so cute and reminded me of why they are such amazing creatures: a species that has evolved to sleep). This “quick operation” wasn’t anything of the sort and turned into a six-hour epic. Yes, six hours! Luke and Annie (an Australian vet volunteering for WVS) worked like troopers removing eight tumours from a female dog. And as I write this the two of them are still laboring away at the Amazon CARES’ clinic performing a surgery on a cat with a bad eye. They are both wonders to behold.
 

The boat trip got delayed by a day because we had an emergeny call. Sabrina was in pain, she was riddled with mammary cancer, hot and painful to the touch and she was having trouble getting about. Ethically this is was a really tough one. The surgical challenge was huge – a mammary strip, spay and mass removal under field anaesthesia – on an old dog with probably aggressive adeno-carcinomas. On the other hand, she was bright in her eye, wagging her tail and her owners clearly loved her dearly. She was a very sweet dog as well. I had Annie with me which was a massive plus because having assistance with the anaesthetic was going to be key.

After a bit of pondering and debating, we decided to go with it. The surgery took nearly 3 hours – it was really tough and all was going well until about 7hours post surgery. Sabrina just wasn´t recovering as I´d expect so Í decided to have another look and make sure I hadn´t slipped a ligature. She also had horrible bloody diarrhoea. Annie gave me a hand and on the second operation, the ties looked fine, but there was a lot of free blood in her abdomen and she seemed to be oozing from everywhere. Whether she has an underlying condition, I´m not sure, but she seemed to be clotting so I tied absolutely everything again. When I left this morning at about 4.45 her colour was a bit better but she is still not quite right. I just hope the whole ordeal hasn’t been too much with her.
 

I’ve petitioned for an extra cabin on the boat so Sabrina is coming with us. We are all depserately rooting that she pulls through.

Amazon amazing. Apparently risk of pirates minimal as crew armed and on 24hr watch. Big relief.
 

A sad day today as the dog with the tumours that Luke and Annie worked so hard to save unfortunately passed away whilst we were filming. They’d brought it with us on the boat, which we’re taking down the amazon, to make sure that it got the utmost care, but very sadly the surgery was too much for her. I feel deeply sorry for both Luke and Annie as they tried their utmost to help her. I guess that’s the downside to the job that sometimes you can try with all your might, but it’s still not enough.

Community days going well, removed seven three inch maggots from dogs back!

Sabrina just passed away. Really sad. It was just too much.