Tapir Mineral Lick — Yasuni Amazon

The mineral licks — collpas — of Ecuador's Yasuní National Park attract Baird's tapirs, South America's largest land mammal, in dawn visits to exposed clay banks where they consume mineral-rich soil to supplement their forest diet, creating one of the Amazon's most reliable large mammal encounters at dawn hides positioned above the lick with clear sightlines to the riverbank below. The tapir's extraordinary appearance — its long mobile proboscis, barrel body, and stripe-spotted young creating an animal of Pleistocene character — is fully visible at the collpa hides where the animals stand in the open for 20 to 40 minutes consuming clay with methodical concentration. The Yasuní collpas also attract giant anteaters, peccaries, and the extraordinary variety of Amazon parrots and macaws that descend to the clay licks in the afternoon — hundreds of birds consuming clay simultaneously in a spectacle of colour and noise visible from the same riverside hides used for the dawn tapir encounter. The Yasuní ecosystem — straddling the equator in Ecuador's Amazonian lowland — is by some measures the most biodiverse place on Earth, with more tree species in one hectare than in all of North America, and the collpa visit sits within a wildlife context of extraordinary richness. The overnight canoe journey to the collpa hides through the Yasuní's waterways adds the dimension of an Amazonian night voyage — the river surface phosphorescent with bioluminescent plankton and the forest alive with the calls of potoos and nightjars.