Welcome to Jennie of the Jungle!

In light of my upcoming trip to the Peruvian Amazon, I'll be shedding light on some of the coolest species to see in the area. I'll start with this blog, taken from the Our Amazing Planet website , about rare species dwelling in the Andes and the Amazon. The Andes range is one of the longest on Earth, consisting of 4,400 mountainous miles that stretch through the western coasts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. While the Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest in the world, once covering almost half the South American continent. It once stretched across Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Suriname. The Amazon rainforest is being cut down daily and has shrunk to a fraction of its original size. The rapid rate at which it is disappearing makes an accurate range impossible to record. Here is a gallery of some of the least protected, and some of the rarest, endemic species found in the Andes-Amazon basin of P...

Mmmm...nothing like a warm cup of coffee to get you going in the morning. But does your coffee come at an enormous cost? We're not just talking pocketbook here, we're talking environment. The beginnings of coffee-growing were quaint and quite non-destructive. For over 150 years, coffee was grown under the shade of canopy trees in the rainforest. In the 1970's a new, high-output method of growing coffee was introduced, in which the shade trees and everything else around was cut and cleared so that coffee plants could be planted densely and doused with pesticides and other agrochemicals. This produced more product for the growers, but has sacrificed generations of wildlife that have suffered at the hands of habitat-loss. Sustainable methods of coffee-growing, in which canopy trees and original forest is kept intact and coffee is planted in their midst, is actually beneficial to the environment and to wildlife. Biodiversity is maintained and therefore so is the wildlife that i...