Sue Kaufman, in the Peruvian Amazon

Sue Kaufman, a 20-year veteran of the business world, volunteers with several environmental organizations. She is soon to join Grist's board of directors. Here she chronicles her volunteer activities on a recent expedition with Earthwatch Institute to the Peruvian Amazon..

Today, I try my hand at the other metier of Earthwatch volunteers at Tambopata Research Center: scarlet macaw nest observation.

I'm on the late shift, mercifully, which allowed me to have a "lie in," as an English member of our group called it, until 7:00 a.m. After a 7:30 breakfast and a leisurely morning, we depart for the nest, about a 30-minute walk through the forest. I am accompanied by Francisco, a fellow Earthwatch volunteer from Guadalajara, Mexico, who was sent (funded and given paid time off to attend) by his employer, HSBC Bank. He and I will be responsible for the nest observation.

We are taken to the nest by one of our guides, Sophia, who is from Lima and has worked as a guide for more than two years. During that time and as a result of in-depth training by Rainforest Expeditions, she has learned to identify and spot a significant subset of the outrageous biodiversity that surrounds us. Commuting to work is a nature walk.

The name of the game on this job is "never take your eyes off of the nest." One person is to look at the nest at all times so we can record faithfully all the comings and goings (ins and outs) of the parent macaws as they visit their chick, as well as numerous other events such as adults or chicks looking out of the nest (our chick is too young, thankfully), predators in the area, and, always, the weather.

We settle in to reclining canvas chairs, wondering how on earth we'll be able to record anything that happens, given that the nest is 180 feet away and 60 feet up in a huge Dipteryx tree. Although only one of us is required to look at the nest at any given moment, we both stare diligently at the distant hole, fearful of missing an in or out. My arm muscles are already screaming from holding up my binoculars.

But I also find it suddenly hysterical: Two large mammals staring up at a large piece of PVC pipe, 60 feet up a tree. Of this, scientific research is made?

Yes, the nest we are observing is an artificial one, in this case made of PVC pipe, but sometimes the artificial nests are wooden. The Tambopata Macaw Project, under the direction of Donald Brightsmith, is experimenting with placing artificial nests high up in the trees. The hope is to perfect artificial nests here where the population is large enough to be healthy. Then the approach can be transferred to areas where the population is more fragile. One of the key threats to macaws in the Amazon is the removal, by selective logging, of the giant, old-growth trees where they typically nest.

And it appears to be working. The nests are inhabited at approximately the same rate as natural nests. Although in the PVC nests fewer eggs hatch than in the natural nests, the same percentage of chicks survive.

The other focus of the nest project is determining what goes on in macaw nests, both natural and artificial. That's where we come in. With the help of Earthwatch volunteers, an extensive amount of data on the natural history and behavior of nesting macaws is being collected.

Over the course of the next several hours, we settle into the task. I figure out that I can, in fact, monitor nest activity without my binoculars -- though when something does happen, I greedily grab them. A group of climbers arrives at our nest. Climbers are longer-term volunteers who climb to the nest and lower the chicks to volunteers below, who weigh and measure them. In some cases, early in the nesting season, they also feed the chicks.

The feeding is part of another project goal: finding ways to improve the survival rate. For reasons that are poorly understood, in macaw broods of two chicks, the second chick very often dies of starvation. In broods of three, the third virtually always does. Even so, here in southeastern Peru, the macaw population is large enough and lives long enough to sustain itself.

However, in areas where the population is endangered, techniques that improve survival by second chicks could be valuable. In the early 1990s, second chicks on the verge of death were removed from their nests and fed and incubated in the research center. The result are called chicos, birds that now live and nest in the wild but often hang around the lodge. They are charming, but this is perhaps not the best approach to increasing a wild population.

So now the starving birds are fed once or twice a day in the nest. The researchers have found that after a week or two of this, the parents begin feeding the chicks again.

It is an interesting sport, nest observation, but one with the pace of a cricket game. Long periods of no activity are punctuated by flurries of excitement. The end of our shift, 5:30, seemed a long way off when black clouds began to roll in and the wind picked up.

It's been raining on and off all day and the river is quite high from rain in the Andes. We hear Brightsmith checking to make sure all the climbers are down because a storm is coming. Soon, thunder and lightning are crashing about us and, though we dutifully focus on the nest, our macaws appear to be hunkered down for the duration.

We aren't sorry when our guide, Hans, appears at 4:30 and tells us we must leave because the water is rising in the forest. We slog back on paths that are now inches deep in water, appreciating the tall rubber boots that are part of the TRC uniform.

The river is very high, flooding the tree-lined bank. All through dinner and into the evening, we hear the crash of trees falling into the water, leaving me with a tremendous sense of what a dynamic ecosystem I am visiting.