Fireflies of Made de Dios

I stayed many days deep in the Peruvian Amazon, in the biodiverse Madre de Dios region where life is abundant every second of every hour of the day and night. The nights are pitch black and intense with sounds and scents, and only the full moon in a cloudless night will provide rays of light trickling through the dense canopy.

I stayed at the Amazon Research and Conservation Center (ARCC), and it is right by an oxbow lake that provides a wide opening in the jungle, from where you can see the incredible starry sky. Before the moonrise, the amount of stars I could see was simply amazing, but perhaps more amazing is all the bioluminescence from the myriads of insect species. Some emit long streaks of green light (seen high on the left, in front of the tree), but they are few and far between. Others emit yellow, and they are more abundant, and this image is a composite of several exposures that have captured these lights.

It’s like the stars of the heaven are visiting earth. Life is endlessly amazing, and I am so grateful of all the things I see!

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Recently updated on 1 October 2015