The parrot clay licks are Yasuní's signature. Cobalt-winged parakeets arrive in dense flocks, with mealy and yellow-crowned amazons and scarlet macaws among them, feeding on mineral clay in the early morning. The best-known licks sit within community-owned land near the Añangu area, and activity is much stronger on mornings without rain.

The canopy towers are how you convert biodiversity into sightings. From platform height you look across the treetops at mixed flocks, toucans, cotingas and, with real luck, a harpy eagle — a bird present in Yasuní but rare enough that no lodge can promise one.

The blackwater creeks and oxbow lakes hold giant otters, hoatzin, caiman and the park's most approachable primates. Squirrel and woolly monkey troops come down to the water's edge, and a paddled canoe at dawn puts you among them without engine noise.

December to January and August to September are the drier windows and the best times to visit, though this is rainforest and rain is a certainty in any month. Dawn is decisive here more than anywhere: clay lick activity, primate movement and bird song all peak in the first two hours, and the forest goes quiet by mid-morning.

Practicalities

Access is via Coca, a short flight from Quito, then a motorised canoe down the Napo river — typically two to three hours — and often a further paddled canoe into a lodge's own creek. There is no self-guided visiting: you stay at a lodge and go out with its naturalist guides.

Several of the best lodges are owned and staffed by the Kichwa communities whose land they sit on, and choosing one of those is the most direct way for a visit to support the people defending this forest — a live issue in a park that also sits above substantial oil reserves.