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'06 Maps for: Conanicus -- Della --
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16 Oct: Della spent
15 days at one spot in the Magdalena Valley. On the 10th she moved 100 mi
(161 km) up the valley. On the 11th she crossed the eastern cordilleira of
the Andes, about 100 mi east of Bogota, the capital of Colombia, passing
down into the lowlands of Colombia. She spent the 12th on a small river,
the Vichada, that feeds into the Orinoco River.
On the 13th she moved further southeast and
pushed on, arriving very close to where Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia
all come together at the very headwaters of the Rio Negro. Some time on
the 13th or 14th she crossed the very vague demarcation between the
Orinoco and Amazon drainages. There is, in fact, no "continental
divide." If you know how to do it, there's a big swamp between the
drainages, where you can canoe from the headwaters of the Rio Negro into
the Orinoco drainage, without a single portage!
On the 15th or 16th Della moved into Brazil and is
on the Rio Negro. She is just below the
equator, which passes, not coincidentally, through Ecuador far to the
west..
She is now, as this particular Osprey flew, 3866
miles (6188 km) from home. With the 2 week layover up in Colombia, her
miles/day are pretty irrelevant, but for what it's worth, she's averaged
94 mi (154 km)/day since she left her nest in Delaware 41 days ago, on 6
Sept. Scroll down for details of one stop along the way.
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Here's a Google Earth image of one of Della's
locations for 13 Oct. She's on an oxbow lake on the Rio Inirida.
The professor in me won't let me leave this
without digressing on oxbow lakes, given such a nice example here.
You never know what you're going to learn about
while following Ospreys!
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As rivers flow, their banks move horizontally
through the forest. Erosion takes place on the outside of a turn, while silt
is deposited on the inside of a bend, as is obvious in the upper left of
this picture. Remarkably, they can cut through 100 yds of forest in a year.
In this image, upstream from Della's location on the 13th, one can see that
an oxbow lake is about to form. Once the two bends of the river meet, the
main flow of the river will take the short cut, and deposition of silt on
what will become the outside turn will close off the big loop, creating a
big oxbow lake.
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