Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: From above, the heart of the Amazon forest can look completely intact, unbroken from horizon to horizon.
But walk inside in some regions and you might notice that there aren't monkeys swinging above you.
You walk for hours and never encounter a peccary.
You bend down to look into the mud for tracks, but the mud is smooth, without any signs of a passerby.
The forest is standing, but the life inside is gone.
Scientists call this defaunation.
I've started calling it something else, ghost forests.
Which makes what's happening in one corner of the Brazilian wetlands so remarkable.
Ansafari is a conservation nonprofit that began in the Pantanal and has since expanded into the Amazon, doing something that had never been successfully done before, returning captive raised jaguars to the wild.
I asked its founder, Mario Haberfeld, what it feels like now, more than a decade into that work.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Pretty much every day with guests, we see either the cubs or the grind cubs of those two jaguars that had been released. So it's amazing to think that if it wasn't for this rewilding process, those jaguars wouldn't even exist.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Once wildlife disappears from the Amazon, can it come back? That's what I set to find out.
This is episode two of Rewilding Amazonia. I'm Brooke Mitchell.
Let's follow the trail.
Puerto Maldonado sits at the confluence of two rivers in the Peruvian Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on earth. When Magali Salinas first visited more than 20 years ago, she went looking for wildlife, but didn't find any.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: I want to see wild animals and I didn't see nothing.
So I begin to investigate what's going on here. And then the people said that all the people go to the forest, eat the animals. All the animals being eating. If you walk three or four blocks, you can find monkeys, pekaries, parrots, macaws. As a pet in town, always feeling
[00:02:31] Speaker A: inspired, she went home, spent years learning zookeeping and wildlife trafficking from the inside while working with Lima's ecological police.
Then returned to Puerto Maldonado and opened her rescue center, Amazon Shelter.
[00:02:46] Speaker C: One day I sold everything. My house, my car, all my things.
And with that money I came here and I began to build.
Slowly we beginning with two or three enclosures and now we have like 30.
Imagine before the pandemia, we were only 60 animals. Now we're 132 animals. After the pandemic, imagine never in my life.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: One hundred and thirty two animals across 30 enclosures.
And that growth isn't a success story so much as a measure of how Much worse things have gotten.
[00:03:28] Speaker C: After the pandemia, the things were worse, life were more expensive and for the people go to the forest, shoot the animals, eat animals where more easy than get meat or things like that.
And selling animals will be more easy. Also get money easy.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: To better understand the wildlife trafficking crisis in the Amazon, I started digging into the numbers and what I found was staggering.
One group of scientists spent five years visiting 73 markets across 21 cities in Peru, totaling over 850 visits and documented nearly 38,000 live wild animals from 193 species being openly sold.
Shockingly, they estimated that they were only seeing between 3 and 11% of what was moving through the trade, which puts the real number somewhere between 350,000 and 1.25 million animals trafficked in Peru every year.
And that's just one country.
And in another study, one vet clinic in Ecuador over five years documented 4.6 times more wildlife cases than the entire country's official trafficking reports for the same period.
If the official numbers are that far from reality, what are we actually dealing with here?
[00:04:54] Speaker C: The people usually go to the police and should the mother eat the mother and bring the baby at home as a bed. These animals receive a wrong diet.
And usually when we receive care, there are babies that has delivered really very, very bad for the kind of food that they receive. And most of them, they don't survive.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Magali has 54 howler monkeys in her care right now, and each one represents a mother killed in the forest.
Howler monkeys are among the Amazon's primary seed dispersers, carrying seeds kilometers from their source.
So 54 animals in one rescue center in one Peruvian city is just as much an ecological story as it is an animal welfare story.
For the animals that survive, intake rehabilitation takes a minimum of three years and begins with something that made my heart clench.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: We need to check the behavior part. We need to put in a group trying to make grow with a group, because before he was a human, the behavior is as a human.
And in case of howlist, they suffer of a big depress when you make that change.
So we need to be very careful because when the animal begin to get depressed, the immunology system go down and they can die.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Also after three or more years of rehabilitation, Magali then has to find somewhere safe to release these animals.
And safe in the part of the Amazon where she is based is harder to find than you would expect.
She doesn't use protective reserves because the evidence on the ground tells her she can't trust them.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: In this Jungle. It's complicated. Included the reserve. The miners included are getting in the reserve now.
Illegal miners. I was walking and I found bullets at the floor. That means that the people get into their reserve.
So are places that I don't trust to release. I need to be really sure that if I release, my animals will be okay safety. Imagine release and then they will shoot it or eat it.
For me will be really bad.
I will die
[00:07:34] Speaker A: instead. She releases rehabilitated wildlife in private forestry concessions.
It isn't the solution anyone designed, but it works. And for Magali, working is enough.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: I usually travel before to the place that I want to release it. And I go and study.
Where is the place if it's safe, if no communities there, if not people. Usually the most imperfect places to release are the forestal concessions. Because there are big places, 300,000 hectares, but no community closed. They protect the place. They don't let the people get in. They have 22 controls. When I stay, I never heard shoots or people hunting.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Before we leave, Magali, there's one more story I want you to hear.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: I received a howler monkey. She was a female. She came with only moms. She was very abused. She caused panic attacks. Probably when they killed the mom. They remember that. So when we receive it and we shove it with us, she began to scream and then bite in the face strong.
And then I began to make a treatment and it was getting better. And then I make a group and it was a really good group. And we released it in the forest. And after a couple of one year things. So we get back to check monitor.
And I was walking with a veterinari that always helped me. He's an Italian, he's Chris.
And then he said to me, magali, your howlers. And I said, where? No, it's a lead. No, it's your howlers. They are moving. And then I saw a monkey that coming directly to me.
And it was my monkey, the monkey with the panic attack. She came very close to me, like 3 meters. And she stayed like 20 minutes watching me and trying, like say something.
And then I begin to cry and try to talk with her. And I said to the vet, go and take the camera, we need to flip film that she's not moving. She was pregnancy and she was staying and watching me, like trying to say, thanks, I'm here with my group, I'm pregnancy, I'm safety. That was like one or two years after the release.
Then I begin to call her name and cry a lot. And she stayed with me 20 minutes and then she left with the group.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: A monkey who arrived at Amazon shelter in a panic, biting and screaming. Coming back two years later, pregnant and free is everything this work is for.
It doesn't undo the 54 howler monkeys still in Magali's care, or the mothers who were killed to bring them there, or the bullets she found on the floor of a protected reserve.
But it is proof that the work is worth doing and that the forest, when given half a chance, can support the life returned to it.
Magali is working at the emergency end of this crisis, taking in what the forest has lost and laboring, animal by animal, to give it back.
But what about the opposite end of the food chain? What happens to an ecosystem when the animals at the very top disappear and are returned home?
Jaguars are the apex predator of the Amazon, the largest big cat in the Americas, and one of the most ecologically important animals on Earth.
Remove the jaguar, and the effects ripple throughout the entire ecosystem.
Scientists estimate that the protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon could support nearly 48,000 jaguars.
But the actual number of these cats isn't nearly that high.
Jaguars now occupy only half their historic range, pushed out by habitat loss, retaliation, and illegal hunting for traditional medicines.
In some regions of the Amazon, scientists have found that professional hunters kill between 110 and 150 of these large cats each year.
The evidence is clear.
Jaguars are losing ground.
Which brings me back to the central question of this episode.
Once a species disappears, can it come back?
And in the case of the jaguar, an apex predator whose hunting skills have to be learned from its mother, what would that look like?
Mario Haberfeld and the On Safari team have spent the last decade answering that question.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: I actually used to be a race car driver. I raced for over 20 years. I've always had two passions in my life, which was racing and wildlife. And it got to a point in 2008 that I thought it was time to retire from racing and pursue this other passion of working with wildlife, with conservation.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: He spent two years after retirement traveling the world to see wildlife in its natural habitat.
From that trip, an idea emerged. He'd seen what ecotourism had done in Africa.
Specifically at a lodge in South Africa where 50 years ago, it had been new, nearly impossible to see leopards.
A deliberate program of habituation, slowly acclimatizing the cats to the presence of vehicles, had transformed the lodge into one of the most celebrated wildlife destinations on Earth. And in doing so, had transformed the leopard from a pest to be hunted into an asset to be protected.
Mario wanted to do the Same thing in Brazil with jaguars.
I asked him why this species?
[00:13:56] Speaker B: The most important reason is that jaguars are on the top of the food chain. By protecting the jaguars, really what you're doing is not just jaguars. It's trying to protect the whole biome. Jaguars used to exist all the way from southern USA to southern Argentina. Nowadays they only occupy 50% of their original home range. About 60% or so of the jaguars left in the world are in Brazil, mainly in the Amazon and in the Pantanal. So if you have jaguars in that place, it means that place is a
[00:14:36] Speaker A: healthy habitat, a healthy habitat indicator and an umbrella species for an entire biome.
The ecotourism results in the Pantanal, where on safari began, made the economic case just as clearly.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Before on safari, they used to have two or three sightings of jaguars a year.
Nowadays, for the last five years, we've been heading between 1000 and 1200 sightings a year. And pretty much between 99 and 100% of guests in the last five years have seen at least a jaguar during their stay. Normally a lot more, from two or
[00:15:16] Speaker A: three sightings a year to over a thousand.
That transformation, making jaguars reliably visible and in doing so, making them economically valuable to the communities around them, is still the foundation of everything on safari does. But it wasn't where the story ended.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: More by chance than planned, we started a rewilding front because there was an incident. They tried to capture a mother jaguar with two little cubs. By a lot of different mistakes, the mothers ended up dying.
So they were left with two little jaguar cubs. And we thought, well, we don't want them to spend the rest of their lives in a zoo.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Every previous attempt to rewild captive raised jaguars had failed. Not because the animals couldn't hunt, but because they become too attached to people during captivity.
Aunt Safari had to crack that problem from scratch.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: The most important thing that we learned when we constructed this huge enclosure in Pantanal, we put the jaguars there. The first challenge was learning how to feed them right. How they would perceive something else as food, right in the beginning was very hard. And then until we learned that they needed to fast for a few days before they would hunt again.
And then we say that we did like a video game where they had to achieve certain steps to move on to the the next one. So they started hunting small animals, then females, then males, then, I don't know, from capybaras to caimans, all the way to the end when they were hunting male peccaries, which can be quite dangerous. For them. But the main thing was that they couldn't see that we were the ones putting the prey inside the enclosure. Right. So for them was like a miracle. Right. Well, suddenly something appeared in here and they had to hunt.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Ten years after those first two cubs were released in the Pantanal, the results speak for themselves.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Pretty much every day with guests, we see either the cubs or the grand cubs of those two jaguars that had been released. So it's amazing to think that if it wasn't for this rewilding process, those jaguars wouldn't even exist.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: That's the Pantanal program where everything started.
But what happens when you try to do the same thing in the Amazon in a forest so dense you can barely see 10 meters ahead of you?
[00:18:01] Speaker B: We've done an enclosure in the Amazon that. That's huge. It's like 2 hectares with very dense forest. We had to do it that way in order not to cut any big trees. So we kept deviating, and that's how big it ended up. So that made our job difficult in the beginning because we would let the jaguar go in there, could never find it again. We released already a few females.
Last year, we released the first male in the Amazon.
So far, every jaguar that we release have been very successful in the Amazon. It's much harder to follow what happened, right. Because it's very dense, hard to see them. Obviously, they get released with a satellite color. So we know if it worked or not. We know they survived, they hunted and everything for more or less the two years where the collar worked. But I'd say they survived like any other.
Why a jaguar would do a program
[00:19:03] Speaker A: that began in the Panzanal and has now taken root in the Amazon, expanding across four Brazilian biomes. And in Mario's mind, there's no reason to stop there.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Jaguars, they don't show their passports, right? They just cross borders.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: It's a simple observation, but it captured something true about conservation. At this scale, the problems don't stop at borders, and. And neither can the solutions.
Mario started by wanting to see a jaguar.
Fifteen years later, he and his team have built something that spans four countries and shows no sign of stopping.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: You can't lose hope, right? You have always to be optimistic. Otherwise everything you do doesn't go the right way. But I think the main thing is seeing the results. You know, everything we've done so far worked quicker or took a long time, but in the end of the day, worked. And we can see the impact that we've been creating.
We need to leave this world for the next generation. And it's not fair that our generation destroyed it and leave everything destroyed for the next generation.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Mario and the Ansafari team are bringing back what's been lost at the level of the species itself, improving that even an apex predator can find its way back to the wild.
As I kept investigating, I realized that both Magali and Mario were working on the downstream consequences of a problem that needed to be addressed at the source.
The illegal wildlife trade, bushmeat markets, and the slow emptying of the forest.
These don't happen in a vacuum.
They often happen because communities living inside and around the Amazon have no viable economic alternative to extraction.
And until that changes, no amount of rescue or rewilding will be enough to keep pace with the loss.
That realization brought me to Brian Griffiths in a solution I did not see coming.
Brian is a faculty member at Georgetown University, the president of a nonprofit called the American center for Environmental Education and Research, and the director of conservation science at One Planet, where he works directly with indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.
[00:21:27] Speaker D: I got connected with somebody that was doing conservation work and I thought, you know, that sounds pretty cool, it sounds pretty fun. And I had this image in my head of being like a wildlife biologist, even though my degree was not preparing me to do that.
So I started to reach out to nonprofit organizations looking for internships. You know, I remember around that time people telling me, oh, you know, well, running around in the rainforest or swimming in the ocean, you know, those aren't real jobs. You know, nobody's going to pay you to do those things. And I just remember thinking, I'm willing to compete for those. I've never felt that spark before.
[00:22:04] Speaker A: He found that spark and has spent his career since in the Amazon, working at the intersection of conservation science and indigenous community rights.
He told me that one of the most powerful conservation tools available in the Amazon right now is hunting.
Managed, legal, community controlled hunting. And to understand why, let's meet the Mikuna.
The Mikuna are one of the most vulnerable indigenous communities remaining in the Amazon.
Fewer than 600 individuals living in four communities in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon near the border with Colombia.
They are situated around a regional conservation area called the Macuno Kichwa, which encompasses roughly a million acres of what Brian describes as primary pristine rainforest, about 22% larger than Yosemite National Park.
A team of Western scientists have visited the center of that area only once in the early 2000s.
What's there in terms of species diversity is still largely unknown.
For centuries, the Maikuna have depended on that forest for everything.
Protein, shelter, medicine, culture. But in the early 2000s, something happened that nearly brought it all to an end.
[00:23:22] Speaker D: There were a bunch of loggers that invaded the ancestral lands of the Maikuna and they set up logging camps deep, deep in the forest.
And at those logging camps, the loggers only hunted for food. And so they had one or two professional hunters who would go out in the forest every day and find enough protein to feed everyone. And so over the course of about 10, 15 years, the loggers essentially killed every edible animal in the rainforest. And they were fishing, but they were using fish poison. And so all the, the fish were dying and that poison was flowing down the river to the, where the Micuna live and killing the food security essentially of the Micuna as well. And so by about 2010, the Mikuna were starting to starve. I mean, they talk of that time and they say that they were eating frogs because their children were hungry.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: A community reduced to eating frogs in a million acre rainforest.
That's what defawnation looks like at the human level. And the Mykuna's response to it was to mobilize politically, form a federation, evict the loggers after a long and violent period of resistance, and successfully petition the government to establish the regional conservation area.
Since then, mammal populations have been rebounding, and the Maikuna, who have been living inside that forest for generations, are managing the recovery themselves, not as beneficiaries of a conservation program, but as the active stewards of a landscape they never stop belonging to.
Now, Brian and One Planet are working with the Mikuna to obtain a legal wildlife management plan, a policy instrument under Peruvian law that would allow them to legally harvest and sell specific wild game species from their conservation area.
The species in question are carefully selected for the resilience Paca collared peccary, red rocketdeer Animals with high enough reproductive rates to sustain a controlled harvest without drawing down the population.
And the ecological logic behind why this work starts with what's happening at the center of the conservation area, where almost no one ever goes.
[00:25:34] Speaker D: All populations of mammals, you know, in a healthy system, their populations increase exponentially, but only to a specific point. And that point really is the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. There's only a certain number of fruit trees, there's only a certain number of mineral licks in the Amazon that'll support a specific individual number and abundance of each of these specific animals. So that abundance, for instance, for a tapir, that carrying capacity might be as low as 4 tapirs per square kilometer.
But the thing is that animals of course, don't know where the limit is, right? So you know, when they experience this exponential growth in their populations, typically they'll shoot way over carrying capacity. They're just breeding successfully and they're having babies and successfully raising those babies. There's plenty to eat. But once they pass the population passes that carrying capacity point, suddenly there's not enough food or whatever the limiting resource is to go around.
If you think about a tapir, for instance, that's hungry, faces a choice, compete for the little bit of food that does exist, starve to death, go somewhere else, right, where there might be more food.
And so basic sort of ecological theory is that if there's an area nearby where there's plenty of food because tapirs have been hunted, the tapirs from the healthy areas will move into those depleted areas. So as long as those two systems are connected, the source is connected to what we call the sink.
There's a continuous supply of animals coming in. The center of this conservation area, which is so remote the micuna even rarely go there, is definitely at carrying capacity for each of these species. And so the connectivity of those areas means the micuna can hunt as much as they can possibly eat and they will not deplete the ecosystem of mammals.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: The center of the conservation area functions as a permanent reservoir, so full of animals that they naturally flow outward into the areas where the Maikuna hunt.
As long as that connectivity holds, the harvest is self replenishing. The ecology works.
But Brian told me the second argument for managed hunting is the one that matters most for the long term survival of the forest itself. And it's written not in population dynamics but in economics.
[00:28:05] Speaker D: If your family is starving and you don't have any source of income, when companies come knocking on the door, and they do, like logging companies, they'll come knocking on the door and they'll say, hey, we're willing to give you 2000 solace and 200 gallons of gasoline. Right now all we need is 10 hectares of your forest.
That's a pretty good deal because you have hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest, right?
Hundreds of Thousands, you know, 10, no big deal, right? Maybe they might be, might be pushed, they might feel like they need to, they might feel pressure, right? To sign that contract, to sign away the inheritance of their children. That's what we're talking about, right?
If their pockets are already full, then the micuna can laugh them out of the room. They can say, no, thank you. You know, we are Rich already, right? And we don't need to sell our timber to commercial logging companies. We don't need to sell to commercial poachers. We don't need to contract with gold miners to destroy our rivers in exchange for pocket change.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: That framing conservation as economic self sufficiency rather than sacrifice is what Brian means when he talks about community based conservation.
The Maikuna aren't being asked to protect their forests out of altruism.
They're being given the tools to earn a sustainable income from the stewardship they're already doing, so that when the extractive industries come knocking, and they always come knocking, the answer can be no.
But here's where the story gets complicated.
Obtaining a legal wildlife management plan under Peruvian law is not simple. It requires years of scientific data collection on species densities. Painstaking, expensive, technically complex work that requires NGO partnerships, grant funding and sustained scientific presence that most indigenous communities in the Amazon don't have access to.
Brian has been working with Maikuna for years. One Planet has poured significant resources into the effort and they still are not there yet.
[00:30:20] Speaker D: This effort, even collaborating with NGOs and scientists, has taken years and years and years and funding and grants. And, you know, I lived there for 13 months. I mean, an immense effort. And so if, if every community doesn't have those NGO connections, doesn't have scientists that are willing to spend their careers, you know, pursuing wildlife management goals, how are they ever going to get this accomplished? In all of Laredo, which there's millions of hectares of rainforest, I think there's only three management plants.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Three management plants and millions of hectares of rainforest.
That tells you how difficult the system makes it for communities like the Mucuna to formalize what they're already doing sustainably.
Meanwhile, the commercial bushmeat trade in cities like Iquitos operates largely outside any regulatory framework, supplied not by indigenous subsidence hunters, but by commercial networks that no management plan was ever designed to reach.
The gap between what the law intend and what communities can actually accessed remains one of the biggest unresolved problems in Amazon conservation.
[00:31:31] Speaker D: Conservation and preservation are not the same thing. If I have a, you know, my favorite chocolate bar and I'm trying to preserve it, I put it in the freezer and I forget about it, you know, I pass it on to my kid when I die, right? But if I'm trying to conserve it, I use it bit by bit, right, and save it for as long as possible. The Micuna are interested in conserving their mammals, right? These are, are things that they need to be used. That use is written in thousands of years of cultural history, written into their very livelihoods, written into their into their connection with the forest.
The idea is that they want that use to be sustainable and they want it to be in a management scheme that allows them to also earn money.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: That distinction, conservation rather than preservation, use rather than untouchability, is one that western conservation has been slow to embrace and one that the Mikuna have understood for generations.
The evidence says their model works. The question is whether the systems around them will catch up in time.
This episode was built around one can wildlife come back to the ghost force of the Amazon?
The answer is yes and it's already happening piece by piece in rescue centers, rewild enclosures, indigenous communities across the Amazon and more.
But this work can't stay small.
It needs connected landscapes, intact corridors and real space for these animals to move through.
And that's where this journey is head heading next.
I'm Brooke Mitchell. See you in the next episode.
