[00:00:04] Speaker A: I'm standing at the reception area of the tiny airport importer Joffrey, waiting for a 16 seater bush plane to land and take us to the southern pantanal.
Through the haze, we see the plane approach, land on the grass airstrip and make a well practiced EU turn to face the way it came.
My stomach leaps with excitement. The last time I flew in a plane this size was to cross the famous Okavango delta in Botswana. And now I was about to fly over an even bigger wetland.
We said our goodbyes to Fred and boarded the plane. The hour long flight was a true highlight of the expedition. The waterways expanded as far as the eye could see, a real life painting of greens and blues dancing in synchrony across the landscape.
As water levels lowered along the flight, large patches of cleared land began to appear.
From the air. You could see the stark contrast between lush pentanol vegetation and barren land demarcating a ranch.
Admittedly, my feelings were torn seeing this, I had just spent a week in pristine habitat with so much life I could barely comprehend it. And then to see acres upon acres of cleared land in this ecosystem was difficult.
But I knew some of these branches were a large reason why the southern Pentagon's wildlife still had a home. Nature tourism was growing significantly in the area. Our presence was proof, after all.
Our plane gently descended and landed on a dirt airstrip in Miranda city. Waiting for us was a small welcoming party of two, our driver and new guide, Lajagna. Lajania is a tall, athletic woman with dark hair falling midway down her back, tucked underneath a wild source hat. We sent our hellos, loaded into our transfer van and hopped on the road.
Since we couldnt check into our hotel for several hours, Chris arranged a visit at Priecto Sulabra for lunch and a river cruise. After driving for 30 minutes and a quick stop at a rest station, we turned off of the main road and onto a dirt path. Lajeune hopped out several times to open cattle guards for a van to pass through. We were clearly in a mixed yeast area.
The vegetation looked wild and not managed by humans, but domestic livestock lived somewhere close. Was this our first encounter with a sustainable farm in the pantinella? After about ten minutes of weaving through brazilian forest, we arrived at the project. We stepped out of the van and were hit with a wave of heat. This region was even warmer than the north, I thought to myself for the umpteenth time. Isnt this supposed to be brazilian winter? Why is it so dang hot? The gentle breeze did nothing to cool us down. I no longer question why fires had raged in the pensada for the preceding three years. The dry, hot air could easily fuel an inferno.
We stepped inside a small, inviting presentation room and were greeted by an older gentleman in a worn out t shirt, well used hat and trousers made for working. This was the owner of Projekto Salabre and the visionary behind the farm. Today we each took a seat to hear more about the ranch from our host. Lajania was our interpreter. We learned that this farm was part of a biodiversity corridor program that played a crucial role in protecting the area's rivers, flora and fauna. The corridor included several local municipalities, all with the goal of restoring and protecting the zelobra and Miranda rivers.
Fishing was prohibited amongst most of the corridor and highly regulated where it was allowed. Our host also showed several clips of endangered species caught on their mosaics of camera traps. We watched interesting footage of pumas, jaguars, and marsh deer, all living alongside their cattle, horses, and cultivated lands.
After the presentation, we sat down for a delicious brazilian style farm to table lunch.
Once we were done eating, we grabbed our cameras, bug spray, and sunscreen for a short river cruise.
As we were loading into our transfer wagon, a group of locals from the morning tour came for lunch, and I quickly realized that some stereotypes are true.
Let's just say the number of speedos I've seen on men doubled in a day.
Sorry, my american is hanging out right now. But tiny clothing aside, they looked like they were having a great time and had decided to spend their day at an eco ranch to swim. Swim and enjoy the river. I smiled. This area was more likely to stay wild if locals continued spending their time and money at locations like this.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: And we're off.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Our driver fired at the tractor, and we were off. We traveled along dusty roads until we reached the Salobra river. We piled into the canoes noticeably a little more wobbly than our safari speedboat, and set off down the river.
We were mildly entertained after being in the heart of the Pansadow for seven days. Our little canoe ride was admittedly a tad underwhelming. But we saw countless bird species, some of which were new, and we spooked a freshwater stingray. Pardon my ignorance, but I didn't even know freshwater rivers could have stingrays. It was a surprising encounter that I would surely not forget.
After reaching the end of the river, we turned around and headed back upstream.
We piled out of the canoe, climbed up into the wagon and half bounced, half rode back to our transfer van to continue on our journey.
By late afternoon, we had reached the next destination of our adventure, Vizenda San Francisco.
Vizenda San Francisco is a 9000 hectare equatorism farm that specializes in in cattle farming, rice cultivation, and nature tourism.
If you recall from part one of this series, and part 295 percent of the pontanal is privately owned, meaning that protection of this critical habitat falls mostly in the hands of landowners.
This vizinda was the perfect example of private landowners taking conservation into their own hands and becoming allies for wildlife.
In addition to land protection, the owners have allowed scientific research on their land for over two decades. The ongoing project, study the lives of the Vizinnas, jaguars, endangered McCalls, herptophana, and the highlight species of this portion of the adventure, ocelots.
As we dropped our belongings in our rooms, we met back at the reception area for our first wildlife drive.
Similar to the water based portion of the trip, we were scheduled to embark on daytime and nighttime wildlife drives to observe land dwelling species, thereby completing the picture of the full biodiversity of the panzerhau.
Lajagna led us to a platform where we boarded our wildlife viewer. It was enormous, designed to accommodate 20 people, these four diesel trucks, converted into wildlife viewers, were equipped with with five rows of seats arranged auditorium style, complete with a roof to shield guests from the intense brazilian sun.
We had reserved the vehicle for private use, allowing us the freedom to pursue sidings without being constrained by annoying tour schedules.
We said hi to our driver and spotter, then loaded onto our trek to see what was out and about.
As the sky turned dark, the feel of the region changed, the air grew cooler, and the night seemed to burst into a full chorus of frog and insect songs.
Not long after we reached the rice plantations, we found one and then two crab eating frogs. I could tell from their similar size and body language that they were mates. The female was lactating, which meant that their den was somewhere nearby.
I reflected on how many females we had seen lactating on this tree. This must be the prime birthing season for many species in the pontanal.
Both were on the move, looking for a meal, scanning the tall grasses and fence line for something edible. Then, much to our surprise, one of the foxes stopped, hopped, and came away with a prized toad.
Oh, my gosh.
After the fox pair walked into the darkness, we continued on our night drive.
Our next sighting was a true highlight in ocelot.
This individual was a male in traveling along the drainage ditch between the gravel road and rice plantations.
Judging by his open wounds, he recently lost a fight, or maybe two.
Hmm. Was it also ocelot mating season? Did he challenge the local dominant male and lost.
Maybe he won and mated with a local female, but not without a tough fight first. The longer we watched him, the more my questions about these cats started to accumulate.
Like the nocturnal crab eating fox beginning their nightly routine, this male was hungry and started searching for prey.
He found something, stopped, began cocking his head to pinpoint the location of his victim, and then pounced. To our delight, he stood up with a big fat rodent in his mouth. He gave it a good crunch, then began prepping his meal by peeling off its fur.
It's tearing off the fur right now.
Once he was satisfied with his hair pulling job, he chewed and swallowed his prey, then went back to searching for food.
It was late by this point, and we were ready to head back. Tomorrow would be a new day with new adventures and the southern continental.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: The.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Following morning, we woke a sunrise for breakfast in our first daytime wildlife drive on the farm.
After we finished our meal, we were introduced to the Vizendas resident ocelot biologist Anjique and wildlife veterinarian Vanessa.
The wild source has been supporting Anjige's research ever since Bill met him at San Francisco in the late 2010s. Since then, Anjige has aligned his ocelot fieldwork with our trips so that we could be a part of the excitement.
Not only were we going to observe Pantanell's land animals in the wild, but we were also going to learn about them from a scientific perspective. Being a biologist, I was stoked to meet Onrique and have our group join him in his field studies.
Everyone grabbed their cameras and binoculars and loaded into the wildlife viewing truck. We left the reception area and headed east as the red orange sun slowly made its ascent.
Once we were beyond the cattle area, the vegetation greatly diversified and turned into a scene straight out of Jurassic park.
We had not encountered a landscape like this before.
Towering wax palm trees rose high above the vegetation below the ground was half submerged in water and blanketed in thick vines and bushes. The whole landscape was a vibrant green, as if mother nature turned up the green saturation dial.
Lajanie gave us more information about the protected region of the visita.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Here's the most preserved area of the farm because it's close to the river and it's connected to the lake, to the creek, San Domingo's creek. So this area stays under the water during the wet season. That's why they preserve that area because it's not possible to use, to manage.
And here in Brazil we have a law that you must preserve 20% of your land, if you have a farm, depend on the biome where you are here is 20%. You have to preserve that. You cannot touch, you cannot put animals or anything.
So that's. Let it grow. Yeah. Just let it go grow.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: How high does the water get in here?
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Oh, to here, really flooded. Yeah. Oh, wow. There's some areas in frontanao where get completely dry, like very bad dry. And then during the wet season, it's too 3 meters of water, 4 meters, which like 10ft, 12ft.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: It's amazing.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And here they used to have here in this farm, they use around 4000 ha here. So they used to plant rice, flooded rice and corn.
Now they just have rice. And just a little part of the farm, you're gonna see many, many of those channels all over the place are going to be driving around those dicks. And this is how they manage. Used to manage to throw the water to the right. Irrigation.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:31] Speaker D: Not so much corn, though.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: You don't see much corn.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Not anymore. They used to have. They used to do a rotation a while ago, like soya bean and corn. Soya bean and corn. But this area we used to rent to somebody else to plant. They just have cattles and horses here and tourists, and they used to rent the land to somebody else to plant rice. Now it's their own area, but 100 ha, just only 100 rice. And where it used to be rice, they are letting the breast to grow to put cattle, which is much better here. It's less impact than a crop, for example, in pantanal area. So because of that, you're gonna see many of channels, artificial ones, which was built many years ago. So they pump water from the river and from the rain. Because of that, a lot of animals come, a lot of birds. So that's why here is a very nice hot spot to see wildlife, because there's food and shelter for them, so they feel comfortable around.
We're gonna be seeing some of those. There's a main pump close to the Miranda river and they manage those, like open the channel, close the channel.
That's how they manage the crop here.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: As we continue driving, Onhike explained the differences in ecotones found in this region and why there's such an abundance of wildlife.
[00:15:03] Speaker D: This area here, you can see the relief is a little bit.
Wow, there's some relief because the pantanao is very flat.
So here we are in the ecotone of Pantanao in Cerais. It's where the two biomes meet. It's exactly. If you look on the brazilian system of biomes. We are driving almost on top of the division of Cejado and Fontana. So it's like a piece of cejado inside of the Fontana. So this type of environment has some, some more biodiversity because you have two biomes in, so species of both of them. So that's why not only pampas get, but this area, you might see different carnivore mainly. So it uses this area.
Giant anteaters, they are more common on this higher ground. Some of the armadillos are more common. And then when we look that way, we can see very well, but that starts to get flat. It's when you enter the pontanal in that area, it's where the ranch started, the agriculture area. So a portion of the Pontanao area was transformed for agriculture. And another portion, which is going from our right, far right, all over around is where you have the native pantanal. So for you guys to have an idea what would be the. Because this landscape has been changing since 80, no, 75.
So the natural vegetation of where we are now is like this. Do you see these islands of forest?
So these are just fragments of the original forest from almost 50 years ago. So this has been changed to open pastures for cattle.
So this is a very typical scene of central Brazil. So you have some long wilderness areas that have been cleared for pastures for many, many years.
There's a lot of good grass out here for the cattle. Yeah, yeah, that's very good because they deforested with the pasture. And that's the main. Because the main economy in the pantanao is cattle raising.
And some areas of the Pantanao, because here's the border. Right in the border, you used to have some of these big forests, so they had to clear more. In the. In the plains, you have a lot of natural grasslands as well, especially where the. Because imagine the pantanal is very, very flat. There's some relief where it's a little bit lower. The flood is. Lasts longer, and you don't have forest there because most of the trees don't.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Support those trees like roots.
[00:18:01] Speaker D: Yeah, they cannot live there. So you just start having grasslands. That's when you see an image from high, from the platano. Normally you're going to see a lot of open grasslands and some forest. Forest is normally where the ground is 1 meter high already. It's enough for the flood to behold.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: After driving for 30 minutes, scanning for wildlife, we stopped at a bend in the road and got out to follow Anjige and Vanessa. They were taking us to the location of one of their life traps to show us how they set them up for capturing ocelots, Anjique gave us further information why we're putting here.
[00:18:41] Speaker C: But you remember the kind of river is just there. So this forest, this is kind of ocelot prime habitat, a little bit disturbed, but it's good because they like to travel on routes and roads like that. So what we do is we find a shaded area, because this is sometimes the hardest part to capture them is to find suitable areas for traps. Because sometimes in the open air, they're moving, there's a lot of density of them, but you don't find a good spot. It's very hard because we have to be worried with the heating, because we will open the trap by the end of the day and we'll check in the morning. Very early in the morning, we check all the traps. But because there are several traps, some of them will be later in the morning when we finally get. So it's important to find these shady areas to avoid the heat. But one thing that we always try to do is like, open a little trail, like with a knife, because once we set the trap, to also help luring, luring the cat, we use some bacon.
From here, you can see one of the tree trends is kind of brownish. That's a lot of bacon that we've been spreading inside. We tie a chicken leg, we fry it just to get it to last more in the bush. And we also use like a really nasty juice of sardines. And you keep doing all the trails. So I'm explaining all that because normally we try to be just very few people in the trail, so we don't have our sand. So if you don't mind your way, we're just gonna set the trap there and we come back.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: After the demonstration, we continued on our wildlife drive while Anjige and Vanessa checked the live traps.
For the next three days, we went out every morning and evening to spot wildlife. We saw flocks of greater rhea, the largest bird in South America. Similar to Africa's ostrich, greater rheas are flightless with gray brown plumage. They look like a small cousin to their bigger african counterparts and seemed right at home on the visit, walking through both rice plantations and wild grasslands.
Remarkably, on multiple occasions throughout our drives, we saw groups of marsh deer, which is unusual for the species. As I've come to learn, marsh deer are mostly solitary, but are found in great numbers on the farm due to the abundance of food, protection from conflict with humans and access to mates. We even spotted a book showing off and making himself look extra sexy for a resident female.
Probably the most exciting sighting during a daytime drive was with two juggerundis. Anjige and I were deep in conversation when all of a sudden we both, at the exact same time, caught the flash of two black bodies moving through the tall grasses. In hushed voices, we relayed the message to lajagna and our driver to stop immediately.
In case you've never heard of these cats, Geiger Wendy's are odd looking, utterly fascinating. Small felines. They weigh up to 16 pounds and possess long, slender bodies, flat heads and exceptionally long tails. They resemble weasels more than typical cats.
Unlike ocelots, jaggerundis have adapted to be active during the day, a rare trait among small felines. I found several juggarundi tracks in Costa Rica, but never successfully spotted an individual. So you can imagine my surprise when we saw not one, but two jagarundis.
The first cat dashed away from our vehicle without looking back, while the other stopped and began calling for the other one. Looking through my camera lens, I could tell that the calling cat was young.
The one that ran off must have been its mother, and this kitten was calling for her to come back. Its confusion afforded us with a once in a lifetime sighting. Anjige was just as excited as me. Of all the years he had been studying wildlife on the visit, he had barely seen any juggerundis. I was sure to send him my photos after the experience.
We saw countless other species during our drives, including two types of snakes, countless new bird species, a six banded armadillo and a tapir.
Tapirs are another unique species and look like a hodgepodge mix of an elephant, a pig and a rhino.
Im not joking.
Similar to elephants, they raise their proboscis noses out of the water as they swim. They are also massive creatures capable of reaching weights up to 800 pounds. As obligate herbivores with considerable size, they play a vital role in the seed dispersal of native vegetation, particularly large seeds that other species cannot consume.
However, due to deforestation and conflicts with humans, their numbers are declining, raising concern among conservationists working to restore natural habitats.
How will forests regenerate if their primary seed disperser is wiped out or significantly reduced in number?
Despite these concerns, the excitement of seeing one in the wild doing what it does best, swimming, temporarily putting pushed such thoughts aside, it was a truly special moment.
Now that we had seen an hikes work and observed an ocelot in the wild, we wanted to learn more about the cats.
Luckily for us, Anjike gave an hour and a half presentation all about his work. Dont worry, I wont share the whole thing with you, although I did record the whole thing. But I want to give you some highlight information from the talk. First and foremost, what are ocelots?
[00:25:13] Speaker E: So the ocelot, which is the latin name, is leopardus pardalis, is what we call a medium sized cat. So it's way bigger than house cats, but way smaller than what we call the large cats. And they have a kind of wide distribution, a geographic distribution. So they are found from southern Brazil and northern Argentina, all over Brazil, most of countries of South America, Central America, they go up to portions of Mexico, and there is this tiny little population in Texas, United States, with something like 50 individuals. So when we see a map like that, we think, oh, there's ocelots all over. So this is the potential distribution, or their natural distribution, but it doesn't mean that they are abundant everywhere or not even that they are still in most of these areas. Just to give an idea that this species has these big flexible areas from Ecuador to tropical, and some upper tropical areas, so it distributes through different types of rainforest, through shrubland and shark environments.
I always like to talk a little bit, to explain a bit of the ecology. Australops start looking at their difference between males and females. So when animals they have, males and females are distinct from each other, that we can tell them apart just by looking. We say they have a sexual dimorphism. So australopiths are a very good example of a species with sexual dimorphism because females are normally almost 25% smaller than males. So these are some numbers of the animals that we have captured around. So the females, they weigh in average 9.4 kilos, while males are weighing average 12.3 kilos. So there's a big difference. Of course, males, as you have been able to see with your own eyes, they have this very conspicuous testicle, so it's easy to tell them apart about the activity of the animal. This is a nocturnal crepuscular animal, so most of the chances that we have to see also active, at least, would be in sunrise and sunset. This is frequency graph. That's why the peak is so high. But that's the two points where you have better chances. But they are sometimes active during the day. So it's just to get an idea that unlike if you get a jaguar, look at a jaguar, his graph is very different. You have a lot of activity during daytime. So jaguars, you have chances of real chances of seeing them during the day, ocelots, if you see one during the day, is like really, really unusual because they put most of their activity when it's dark. Why is that? Because most of what they eat is active at night, or not most of what they eat, but their main prey, what they look for, is active at night. But ocelots, they're amazing hunters because they can hunt from small mammals, small lizards, even frogs and toads, to some big mammals like brocketeers. I don't know if you know, brocketeers is a deer about one adult, about this size.
I have recorded rheas being preyed probably by male ocelots. So probably when ryls, they sleep at night, lying down on the ground with the neck on top of the body. That's probably when they managed to get on their neck and kill it. But normally, Australas, they go mainly for small mammals, so either rodents or marsupials. So this is like their, what we would say in Brazil, their rice and beans for every day it's small mammals.
So what is the prime habitat for ocelots? So this is normally considered a forest cat. So that's why supposedly they have the spots. It's a way to blend in the environment. Of course, when we see them and we are looking at them, we can see them well, but when they start moving through the bushes, I think even with the spotlight, you could see that sometimes they just kind of vanish in the vegetation. So normally they are more connected to the forest, which means that they need forests inside their home ranges, their territories. But not all of it needs to be forest. It's important to have forests, but not all of it.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: We had witnessed Anjique's scientific endeavors firsthand. But what inquiries was he looking to answer? And what revelations had he unearthed during his extensive study of the species?
[00:30:08] Speaker E: So again, we come back to the range and we can ask why we came to study this forest cat. In an area, there's so much disturbance and so much open air, it's because we started to have high rates of, well, I've cited in Australasia one of the most sighted species, and we have sightings. This is rice field. That's a female that has had a cub right into one of these culverts that drain water from the field. So it's like completely artificial environment. And this is just to give you an idea that along this 18 years, 80% of the night rice, you spot ocelot. So it's like really amazing. Something very different is going on. So we started to study here and our main hypothesis that these rice fields, they are attracting a lot of rodent. So increase the rodent population, that would increase predator populations. So not if you have a look when you were going by you at night, we were looking for ostlets, but during the day, pay attention. How many raptor birds that you can see. So there's an increase of animals that rely on this type of prey. So we have from artificial land, let's say artificial, but human land, to natural areas, how does density, does it vary? There are more ocelots in artificial area, in the forest. It's all the same. What's going on? So that's one of the main things that we are trying to find out. And to do that, we use the camera trap.
Our camera trapping season lasts normally from mid September to mid December, more or less. We are using 60 stations in the field. So each station has two cameras facing each other, and we set those stations 800 meters from each other. Normally we make two blocks of 30 stations. So we stay two months with 30 stations in one area, then we move two months later to the other block and then we analyze everything as one.
So pretty much we set the camera traps, they're collecting data. When we come back, we start to trial those camera traps and we're going to, let's say separate also pictures. And through the pictures, we will start the identification process. So ocelots, they have unique markings on their fork, which is like human fingerprints, so we can use that to identify different individuals. And the reason why we use two cameras in one station is because the right side and left side are not the same. The pattern is very similar, but the design is not. So it's important to have both sides to be sure which individual you have. But we have a big collection of data here from.
Our database is from 2010 up now. So we have more than 4000 records of ocelots around, and we have identified more than 65 individuals. Toward this period. We have three times more females than males. So the density of females is way higher than males. This is kind of expected for ocelots because they are solitary. And males, they have bigger, way bigger home ranges than females. So let's say they do. In one area, it fits more females than males, if I could say something like that. In our campaign of 2019, the last 60 point grid that we did, we have recorded 43 different individuals. And it translated to a density of almost 47 ocelots for every 100 km², which is considered a high density. The average density of ocelots in its distribution is something like 20. Of course, you have areas much higher and areas very low, but this is above almost double the average. So it's. It's a good oslo area. So again, those curves is just. Another thing was interesting is that although males and females, they have the same chances of being recorded close in their center of activity, the males, they move farther. So they are recorded in much more traps than females. So males are normally between six, seven and ten different stations. They are moving by. Females are maybe three or four. So again, it translates to small home ranges. And males, they're overlapping, probably three, four different females.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: What about the battered male we had seen a couple times on wildlife drives? What was the mating strategy of these cats?
[00:35:02] Speaker E: Because these are solitary animals, and once in a while, they have to get together to mate. So what happened is that a female on heat, she stays on heat for about a week, and for that week she will try to mate. So she starts to leave sand in an air that she's moving more.
She kind of shortens her movement around where she's more active there. And she starts peeing. I'm not sure if that's the correct word to say, but peeing, pooping, scratching, meowing. So she's doing a lot of a racket, because she has one week to try to mate and have a possibility of gestation. So she starts to call and call, and normally she will attract attention of males. They are moving by, they pick the scent, they hurt, and they will get close. And then you have sometimes two, three, even four different males getting to where the female is. And that's why you have a dispute. They're going to have to dispute that female.
So these disputes can be very intense. So this is kind of my suspicions of what is going on with the male that you guys saw in these two last night. Because he has some wounds.
Rup told me that he has some. Looks like some puncture marks. It might be a bite.
It's not the type of wounds caused by a predator, because the only thing that would prey on an ocelot around here would be either a jaguar or a puma. And if they managed to put puncture marks in the skull of an ocelot, the guy wouldn't be moving around trying to eat, so he would be dead. So that's why we think it might be even another ocelot bite and fight. They have a gash in the leg, so these disputes are very intense. And normally what happened, these males, they will try to push the other male away, stay with a female and try to mate with her the most they can to be able to produce a young with her. And when her heat is over, he keeps going to his life, try to find another female. So if we think as strategies of reproduction, we can say that males are going for numbers like quantity, and females are going for quality. Another thing that we managed to do with our work is understanding cause of mortality. So, for instance, this female, we have recorded her in 2018. October 2 weeks later, we found her roadkill on the highway. So this is the main source of mortality of ocelots around here. So although they are protected, they are not hunted, they are not persecuted. Inside the ranch, there's a big highway on the southern portion where animals are always, well, vulnerable to collisions with car. Actually 2020, there was another female that we had records being killed in the highway. So it's an important source.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Back out on our night drive, we spotted the same male two more times. And each time he looked more battered than before.
He now had a deep gash on the inside of his back left leg and opened wounds across his face. He was panting hard, but walking okay and successfully hunting. The Ocelot team decided to let nature take his course and not to intervene.
If this male was meant to survive, he'd find a way to carry on. Anjigate successfully captured him on his camera traps. And who knows? Maybe he'll show up again for us next season.
Our very last day on the visit was the most exciting of all.
There were two important species that eluded us until the final wildlife drive. The west side of the visit was covered with termite mounds, the perfect food source for giant anteaters. If you've never seen a giant anteater before, they look like something straight out of a Sci-Fi movie.
They have wildly extended mouths that barely open, crazy, long, sticky tongues that lop up insects, and a tail equal in length to their bodies with shaggy fur that touches the ground.
Their eyes and ears are tiny, but what they lack for in eyesight and hearing, they make up for with smell. San Francisco is known for its population of giant anteaters, but somehow we had gone our entire visit without spotting one. And trust me, we were looking. Our driver turned left off of the farms main road into a cow pasture that was packed with termite mounds. Driving to the back of the fence line there, right before our very eyes, we found a giant anteater stepping out of the truck. We followed at a safe distance, downwind and out of its range of snake.
After ten minutes on the ground, the giant anteater stepped through a barbed wire fence and walked up into the brush on the other side of the pasture, we hopped back into our truck and resumed our drive.
After traveling for 15 minutes, we abruptly stopped at a culvert brimming with water.
This man made waterway, teeming with native vegetation and wildlife, marked the boundary between the wild, untamed part of the visit and the rice plantations.
Approximately a quarter mile away from us, our spotter caught sight of something large with two eyes positioned at the front of its head. A jaguar.
She was so far away that I had to snap a few photos of her through my camera to make out her form.
Slowly, she traversed along the culvert bank in our direction, clearly on the hunt.
We sat quietly as she made her approach.
It was pitch black outside, the only light coming from flashing fireflies dancing above the pastures.
To ensure we didn't lose the female jaguar, our spotter intermittently turned on his light, searched for the female, then turned the light off again. Closer and closer she came.
The air was eerily quiet, and then, as she reached the ditch at the end of the culvert, our spotter turned on his light and the jaguar was leaping forward in our direction. My heart leapt out of my chest.
With our poor nighttime eyesight, we failed to notice the capybara directly in front of us in the ditch below the very creatures she was stalking.
The copy bars emitted their predator warning calls, alerting others of the hungry cat's presence.
This female was massive. I mean, huge. She was significantly bigger than any of the jaguars we have seen in the north. Her teats were swollen, a common theme amongst the female mammals. Along this trip, she left her cubs in the hidden location while she went off to feed. And judging by her size, her cubs were not going to have any problems with malnourishment.
Jaguars, endangered marsh deer, vulnerable McCalls, rarely seen, small cats, untouched wilderness, agricultural pastures, and livestock all living harmoniously on one piece of land.
Visit San Francisco proved to me that coexistence is possible.
Nature and people were thriving here, so much so that the farm was restoring portions of the rice plantations back to their natural state.
Places like this need to be celebrated and used as a global example of predator friendly beef production, sustainable tourism, and conservation.
Thanks for listening to this four part series in Search of jaguars, a journey through the Pontinelle on rewildology.
This expedition was recorded in August 2023 with the Wildsource, a wildlife biologist owned safari company that is disrupting the industry through empowerment.
If youd like to join me on the WildSources 2024 expedition to the Pantanal either head on over to thewildsource.com, check out the link in the show notes, or reach out to me directly and ill happily send you more information.
I have been asked if there will be a video version of this series and im excited to report that yes, I will be creating a corresponding YouTube series showcasing this expedition.
Be sure to sign up for the Rewadalgy newsletter to learn when the video series will drop and stay up to date on the shows happenings.
Special thanks to Fred Crema, Abbie Martin, Kristen Douglas at Pure Brazil, Bill Gibbett at the Wildsource Anjique, and the guests on the 2023 expedition, and all of our hosts throughout Brazil for making this adventure possible.
If you enjoyed this series, please share it with a friend and tag rewadology on social media with your thoughts. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please consider leaving a five star rating or a review and let others know what you think about the series.
If you'd like to help keep these stories on the airwaves, please consider making a monetary
[email protected] or purchasing a piece of swag to show off your rewadology support.
A portion of every sale and donation are given to the show's conservation partners.
If you're a business owner and would like to sponsor a future conservation expedition series, please reach out to me directly and we'll chat about the possibilities.
Before I let you go, don't forget to get out in nature. Even if it's just your own backyard or a park up the street, every wild space is precious, near or far.
If you do have the opportunity to travel abroad, consider staying at an ecolodge, visiting a national park, or supporting a local ngo working to preserve the environment.
You won't believe how far your seemingly small act of support will go.
Alright friends, this is Brooke signing off. Remember, together we'll reroute the planet.
