Imagine this. It’s night and you’re alone in the rainforest. You’re walking along a narrow trail, a machete in one hand, a torch in the other. You see an oddly shaped branch on the ground and you reach out with the machete to give it a tap. A loud, menacing hiss fills the air. You look up, and a reptilian eye reflects the beam of your torch. You realise you are standing metres from the head of a black caiman, the largest predator in the Amazon. Those metres are entirely occup

I have a confession to make. It’s hard for me, a lover of all creatures wild, to admit this, but… I have rather ambivalent feelings when it comes to the hoatzin. Surely, by the laws of nature, such an inept, ungainly, witless animal should be extinct by now? Hoatzins live along the shores of oxbow lakes, which, in Peru, also happens to be the preferred habitat of the giant otter, an animal I have studied in the wild for several years. So I have had the dubious pleasure, count