She has also said that she still sometimes feels she has not done enough with her life — a statement that sits oddly against the factual record of what she has accomplished, but that makes sense as the psychology of survival, the specific guilt and inadequacy that survivors can feel in relation to the lives they outlived. The question of why she survived and others did not is not separable from the question of what survival requires of the person who achieves it.
In 2019, the Peruvian government named her a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services. The recognition was for her scientific and conservation contributions — for Panguana and for the research it has sustained — rather than for the survival story, which is a meaningful distinction. The survival story is what she is known for in the popular imagination. The conservation work is what she has actually done with the decades since.
## The Hoatzin and the River
One specific detail from her eleven days in the forest is worth attention because it illustrates the specific nature of the knowledge she was applying.
She has described a moment during the trek when she left the stream she had been following to pursue a sound — the calls of hoatzins, birds she recognized from her childhood at Panguana. Hoatzins are associated with rivers and flooded forest. Following their calls led her to a river.
A person without her knowledge would have heard bird calls in the forest and either ignored them or been unable to interpret them. She heard hoatzin calls and understood them as directional information: hoatzins are over there, and hoatzins live near rivers, and the river is that way.