Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area, Protected rainforest reserve near Iquitos, Peru

Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area is a large forest reserve in the Peruvian Amazon with both flooded and non-flooded woodland regions. The area is crossed by rivers that allow visitors to explore different habitats and observe the variety of the rainforest.

Researchers surveyed primates here from the early 1980s, when Pekka Soini and Rogelio Castro worked under IVITA, and Paul Garber and Richard Bodmer arrived from the University of Illinois in 1984. Communities of the Tahuayo and Blanco Rivers, facing logging and commercial fishing since the 1970s, organized with Greg Neise and Bodmer, and Executive Resolution 080-91-CR-GRA-P created the Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Communal Reserve on 19 June 1991. After years of weak enforcement, the reserve was expanded under regional president Yvan Vásquez, and Decreto Supremo 010-2009-MINAM established the regional conservation area on 15 May 2009.

Local communities living along the Tahuayo and Blanco Rivers have deep knowledge of the forest and continue to practice sustainable ways of using its resources. Visitors staying at the lodges can interact with residents and learn how they have lived with these lands for many generations.

The reserve lies southeast of Iquitos, in the Loreto districts of Fernando Lores, Yavarí, Saquena and Yaquerana. There are no roads; access is by boat along the Tahuayo and Blanco rivers, and the rivers, oxbow lakes and canals are also how you move between upland and floodable forest. Bring insect protection and rain gear, since travel and wildlife-spotting are water-based.

The 2003 Rapid Biological Inventory by the Chicago Field Museum recorded 240 fish, 77 amphibian, 45 reptile, 400 bird and 39 terrestrial mammal species here, including 14 primates. Later work raised the counts to over 600 birds and at least 16 primates, among them a saki monkey still being described by Janice Chism of Winthrop University.