Yagua Blow Gun

[Benji]

Very cool man....thanks for sharing.....one persons trash is another persons treasure...thats awesome 👍

[UpNorth]

Very cool... thanks for the show...
heck, I’d try a li’l monkey... lol...🐒

[Narrow Way Knapper]

What, are you afraid the monkey meat might climb back up after swallowing? LOL!

[painshill]

Very cool and what a great find!

This information from the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at Illinois:

Yagua Blowgun

The pucuna, blowgun, is a weapon used by some indigenous people of South America for hunting. The tribe that [this particular] pucuna belongs to is the Yagua people of Peru and Colombia. The Yagua people use the pucuna particularly for hunting monkeys, tree porcupines, pacas, sloths, and birds.

The way that each pucuna is made is different for each tribe. When making the pucuna, the Yagua people take extreme care because this is their main resource for hunting. Yagua pucunas are visually unique because they are wrapped with the root skins from the huambe plant, a kind of philodendron, and no two blowguns or dart canisters are the same. Often, there is an expert craftsman for each component of the blowgun.

Using a blowgun takes a lot of practice. The darts are usually carried in a woven canister and are generally sharpened with piranha teeth. The darts are dipped in a special poison called curare. The poison produces muscle paralysis by interfering with the transmission of nerve impulses at the receptor sites of all skeletal muscles. The effects of the poison do not take an animal down right away, as is often shown in movies. For a small mammal to fully lose consciousness or die it can take up to ten minutes.

The length of the blowgun itself is a large factor in the distance that the poison darts can travel. [This particular] blowgun is slightly more then 7.5 feet long. [This] blowgun may be able to shoot as far as approximately 325 feet at a velocity of 425 feet per second. This is 289 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of the fastest baseball pitcher.


Here’s me trying my luck with a different kind of blowgun some years ago during a visit to an Iban village in West Kalimantan.

[Narrow Way Knapper]

I'm guessing that missionarys brought it back from either Peru or Colombia in the 1970's or 1980's

[south fork]

Nice save but I'll pass on monkey meat before or after they burn the hair off lol .

[Mattern]

Great. do you know it's age? Kim

[Narrow Way Knapper]

And I almost forgot that I have a Yagua bag as well. Made from from palm fibers and dyed with the same kind of bark that the blow gun is wrapped with (the dark brown areas are dyed). They used the bags for everything including bringing home the monkey meal.

[gregszybala]

Not your everyday find, Thanks for sharing this.

[Narrow Way Knapper]

Some more pictures.

[Narrow Way Knapper]

I found this blow gun sticking out of a trash can over near the mission and recognized it right away as being a Yagua blow gun. The channel for the dart to pass through was carved first with a Capybara tooth fastened to the end of a pole (similar looking to an Ishi stick). After the two sides were tied together with pitch tar and bark, a long rod with sand was used to finish up the dart channel. I've included a picture of the Capybara teeth that my Ashanika friends shot and ate. They gave me some and it tasted like chewy beef.