Wildlife, Patience in the Green

Wildlife photography in Nicaragua is mostly an education in waiting. You hear the forest long before you see anything in it. The first morning on Mombacho, the cloud forest volcano above Granada, I woke to a sound like a distant chainsaw crossed with a lion, rolling down through the trees: howler monkeys, claiming the dawn. They are the loudest land animal in the Americas, and they make sure you know it.

Finding them is another matter. The canopy is dense and grey with mist, and a troop of howlers can sit thirty metres up, perfectly still, while you stare straight at them and see nothing but leaves. You learn to track them by the falling debris, by the swaying of a branch with no wind to move it, and eventually you pick out a dark shape backlit against the white sky, head tipped back, roaring at a rival hill.

The smaller residents reward the patient just as well. A turquoise-browed motmot, impossibly coloured, sat on a low branch and swung its long racket tail back and forth like a slow pendulum, utterly unbothered. A column of leafcutter ants crossed the trail in an endless green parade, each one carrying a leaf fragment like a tiny sail. None of it can be hurried.

By mid-morning the mist came down properly, the trees began to drip, and a white-faced capuchin appeared on a branch to study me for a long moment before deciding I was not worth the trouble and moving on. That is the deal in the cloud forest. You are not the photographer here so much as a guest, allowed to watch for as long as you can stay quiet, and asked to leave the green exactly as you found it.