Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  8

  Brazil

  The Pantanal is the Serengeti of South America. Nowhere else can you see wildlife so openly and in such abundance and diversity. While the great plains of eastern Africa are savannah, extending in endless profusion across Tanzania and Kenya, the Pantanal is the world’s greatest wetland, comprising an ancient basin that fills and empties with the seasons in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru. There is immense diversity of life throughout Amazonia, but in the Pantanal, with its long low vistas, it is possible to really see the animals.

  As a girl growing up in Boston I had a Eurocentric view—a legacy of the Founding Fathers, who looked to the great cities across the Atlantic for heritage, culture, and beauty. I spent my junior year abroad at the venerable four-hundred-year-old University of Edinburgh and tromped through the Scottish Highlands and outer islands in my time off. There is nothing quite like the sweet smell of crushed heather underfoot, and to this day I am inclined to head north for new discoveries, and a glimpse of Curlews with their long curved bills plucking berries from the heath.

  No one ever talked to me about the huge expanse of the Southern Hemisphere, although I stared at it on the globe in my father’s study. No one I knew ever went there. They visited Havana for gambling and big bands, and the Caribbean once in a while, or Africa for a safari if they were really flush. But Mexico began calling to my friends and me like a colorful cheap bouquet, and it was just a border hop away. I made multiple trips there in my twenties, camping in the purple deserts of the north, pushing my toes through sandy beaches in the west, or riding horses in the mountains of the south. The people were kind and the food was delicious—once the requisite bout of Montezuma’s revenge was endured and over with.

  I finally ventured farther south to Belize and Guatemala, encountering exotic birds, Mayan temples, and reefs along the coast with an underwater life so miraculous it seemed like a dream. In Guatemala with Victor Perera, we encountered a war-torn people, sad and deeply weary from burying so many loved ones. Guerrillas hid in the forest while government soldiers ripped the film out of my camera before I had a chance to document a village rout. A woman wailed in the early morning light as our boat docked on Lake Atitlán. She had witnessed the horror of her husband being gunned down just hours before. In a Guatemalan refugee camp across the border in Belize, children ran to us through the mud, their bellies swollen with pellagra and their eyes clamped shut with infected fly bites. They had been there for years with no hope of getting out. The civil war lasted from 1960 to 1996 and was essentially genocide of the Mayan people by a repressive military regime. We spent a day with Rigoberta Menchú, a young K’iche’ woman from the Guatemalan highlands whose parents and brother had been tortured and killed. She told her story in I, Rigoberta Menchú, which was published in 1982 when she was just twenty-three years old. In 1992 Rigoberta won the Nobel Peace Prize and continues to this day to bring justice to her fellow Guatemalans and hope to indigenous people the world over.

  I kept looking south, and when asked to cruise the Amazon on a theater trip, from Rio to Manaus, two first-class tickets in exchange for three performances, I jumped at the chance. Brazil was everything I had imagined, read about, or dreamed of. The river was overwhelming in size, like crossing an ocean, with no visible shoreline for hundreds of miles. The occasional Green Iguana rode the waves downstream on earthy islands ripped from the land, and the murky reddish waters carried more volume than all the ice locked up in Greenland. When at last I did venture into the jungle interior, it beckoned like a magnet, promising a wealth of exotic species, which always delivered. I understood what early explorers must have felt and why they needed to continue on up the Rio Negro or down the Paraguay, butting finally into the impenetrable snowcapped Andes, the source of it all.

  Once I was bitten by the lure of South America I kept returning: Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru…it was not possible to put my arms around the vastness of the experience. I was barely dipping a toe in. When Alan invited me to go to the Pantanal in 2010 to see Jaguars I was thrilled.

  Cats are notoriously hard to see in the wild. They are masters of stealth, stalking and then pouncing on unaware prey. They usually work alone in high grass or forest cover. Lions and Cheetahs, which kill communally, are the exception. Alan would rarely see his study animal except in capture for radio-collaring or on critter cams. He was shocked once to learn that the Jaguar he was following in Belize had circled round and was actually following him.

  I never saw a Jaguar when I was with Alan in Belize, nor on subsequent visits. We saw Tigers in India, routed out by canny Elephants, and I spotted a Golden Cat in the high forest of Bhutan. In Africa, prides of Lions took down prey on the open plain and Cheetahs raced after Zebras for all to see. On safari it is expected that the wildlife will cooperate.

  One of my best cat sightings, however, was totally unexpected and close to home. I was birding a mile from my house under some power lines bordering a New York state park. It was a hot August day and I lay on a high granite boulder to rest. When I sat up twenty minutes later, there under the power lines, rolling in the dusty path about two hundred yards away, was a Mountain Lion, or Cougar, its long tail dotted with bits of black, marking it as a juvenile. Still, it seemed full grown, and I watched in fascination as it rolled and rolled, covering its body with a shower of dust the color of its fur. Finally it rose, shook itself of the cloud, and wandered slowly into the woods, never sensing my presence.

  Alan lived nearby, and he and I were soon out tracking the cat. We found scat with deer hair in the feces and Alan saw what looked like a scrape on a tree, the claw striations that marked territory. The area was perfect habitat, many crevices in granite outcroppings left by the last glaciation, and abundant White-tailed Deer, wild Turkey, and Cottontail Rabbit. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not acknowledged the recolonization of New York and New England by the Mountain Lion, despite ten thousand reported sightings since the 1960s. The cat had been extirpated in the 1930s, they told me; the one I saw was probably the release of an ill-advised pet owner. Whatever it was, it was real and marvelous to behold.

  In September 2010, I flew with Panthera’s chairman, Tom Kaplan, in a chartered jet over the Amazon. The flight from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to the city of Cuiabá in Brazil took six and a half hours, with no time change. The journey was over green, green, and more green, the greatest expanse of it in the world. An occasional flare of smoke or fire attested to the slash-and-burn clearing of the land common to tribal people, but for the most part the verdant blanket was uninterrupted, except for the cut of the mighty river west to east.

  Tom Kaplan fell in love with gold as a teenager, after he decided the stock market was a kind of giant Ponzi scheme with little tangible to bank on. He traded wisely and ended up distributing his wealth to favorite causes: health, the humanities, and the survival of endangered species. In 2006 he founded Panthera, dedicated to saving the wild cats of the world. He had followed Alan’s work with WCS and asked him to lead Panthera as its CEO. Together they recruited top field biologists, including George Schaller, and began producing the best science and strategies to save the big cats. They asked me to join the advisory Conservation Council, along with my fellow thespian and conservationist Glenn Close, and I was now going to Brazil to see the work they were doing.

  As we put down on the small grass landing strip, old friends Howard Quigley and the photographer Steve Winter greeted us, along with Alan. Bob Simon and a crew from 60 Minutes were there as well, shooting a segment on Alan, Tom, and the Jaguars. At lunch I learned they had seen Jaguars only at night and were getting a bit desperate for day footage. Steve told Bob he once spent three months waiting for a Jaguar photo with no luck. It was too hot to go out between 1 and 4 p.m., so we all retreated to our small brick cabins and waited for the 114-degree temperature to subside.

  I crossed the dusty central plaza of the old fishing camp, the Porto Jofre lodge, skirting the horses that freely wandered the ground
s, as did Crested Caracara and six-foot-tall Jabiru Storks. A gigantic fig tree dominated the plaza and housed many chatting Monk Parakeets, Black Vultures, Horneros, Kiskadees, and, best of all, six Hyacinth Macaws, which jumped lazily from branch to branch gobbling figs. The largest of the macaws, the endangered Hyacinth looks like a cartoon cutout of a bird, with a prominent yellow ring circling black inquisitive eyes. The hyacinth of their name is more electric blue than lavender, and the yellow plumage on their face heightens the effect. They roost and nest in large tree holes and pop their heads out occasionally like a jack-in-the-box. They are magnificent birds, threatened by the pet trade and for their feathers. Here they were safe.

  In the late afternoon the CBS crew climbed into one of the motorized pontoons and the rest of us followed, several to a boat, speeding up the Paraguay, the wind on our faces a welcome relief from the oppressive heat. I was with the Brazilian biologist Ricardo Boulhosa, a specialist on Jaguars who also knew his birds. Our driver was a handsome young man named Mateus, an uncanny spotter of wildlife. We veered from the others toward a small tributary, passing Amazon Kingfishers spearing small fish, Cocoi and Tiger Herons standing in the shallows, and Large-billed Terns and Black Skimmers sitting on the sand. A family of rare Giant River Otters cavorted in the water while a lone male downstream chased a caiman with a large striped catfish in its jaws. The Otter actually tried to grab the catfish out of the caiman’s mouth when suddenly another caiman bellied off the sand into the water and chased the Otter away. A reptile protecting another reptile! What, I wondered, did the second one get in return for this favor? A good chunk of fish? I am always astonished at interplay within and between species.

  A family of Black Howler Monkeys, among the largest monkeys in the New World, was resting in a big tree. The littlest juvenile was hanging off a branch swinging at the tip when two large vultures flew in on the branch above him. That’s when the biggest male Howler, the size of a three-year-old boy, who was munching on leaves twelve feet away, lifted himself and unhurriedly crossed the branch hand over fist to swat at the vultures, just as any dad might do. The huge black birds rose in the air and took off as Dad retreated to his comfortable perch, a protective eye still on his little one.

  Mateus cut the motor and signaled for quiet. A tangle of vines and brush fifteen feet above the earthy loam of the riverbank was lit by the low sun, and in a cleared spot beneath the shade of a large tree lay a Jaguar grooming her legs and chest. A glint of light pierced her eyes as she looked up briefly and registered us not thirty feet away. She seemed calm, not fearful or even curious, and returned to her grooming. Maybe she knew she was safe on land with us on the water. Or maybe it was just too hot to stir herself. The upwelling of the river breeze had brought her to the spot and there were hours to go before she began her hunt.

  The Jaguar seems perfect in its beauty. Her body was taut and muscular, the coat hugging her sinews like the sleek costume of a trapeze artist, or a wrestler. Each black rosette of her fur was an exotic flower dotting a rare field of beige. Jaguars have large heads with the most powerful jaws in the world. The name “Jaguar” comes from an Indian word, yaguer, which means “killing its prey in a single bound.” They leap on the back of peccary, deer, or Capybara and crush the skull or spine with their canines. The males can grow to seven feet long and weigh two hundred pounds. They are not aggressive toward humans or other predators, preferring flight to fight. I never tire of watching them, although it has been mostly in zoos, where they are not content. They are solitary creatures, for the most part; confinement does not suit them.

  I was finally seeing one in the wild, truly in the wild of Brazil’s Pantanal and not in a zoo or reserve. We observed her for a long time. I looked up from my camera lens and found her staring at me, the same look countless native women have given me when I dare to snap their picture on a foreign street. It was discomfiting, and I suggested we leave her to the peace of day’s last light.

  My first Jaguar in the wild, Brazil’s Pantanal, 2010

  We were late coming to dinner. Alan rose when he saw me enter, seeing the excitement on my face. I embraced him in gratitude for the incredible sight of the Jaguar, almost thirty years after we had first tracked them together in the jungles of Belize. I described her and the abundance of wildlife on the remarkable river. It turned out that Ricardo and I were the only ones who had seen a Jaguar in daylight. The 60 Minutes fellows had one day to go. They scrambled to get out on the river.

  The Jaguar of Central and South America is a single species in its entire range, unlike the Tiger of Asia, which has many subspecies, three gone extinct in the past eighty years. Only the Cougar has a greater range throughout both Americas. The Jaguar was exterminated in the United States by the 1930s; Alan believes that the few still found in Arizona are border crossers from Mexico seeking a mate, not a viable population yet. A male Jaguar travels extensively in search of new territory and a mate. Panthera’s studies found that they will go five hundred miles and more in their search, which ensures genetic diversity.

  Although the Jaguar is better off than the other large cats in Asia and Africa it has still lost 60 percent of its range to development, mostly the huge cattle ranches throughout the Pantanal called fazendas. The ubiquitous white Brahma Cattle grazing these ranchlands surround the Porto Jofre lodge. In fact, Tom Kaplan bought the fazenda across the river from the lodge to keep Jaguars from being shot for killing cattle, an ongoing problem if prey is scarce. Taking down a full-grown steer is not easy for a Jaguar—they would prefer peccary, Capybara, or even caiman—but if a calf or a diseased cow is available they will kill, and then be killed in return by the gauchos. Tom taught his ranch managers that the tourist trade was more lucrative with Jaguars alive. The idea was to replicate this policy with all fazendas in Brazil, and to reimburse the owners for cattle the Jaguars kill until the income from tourism balances out. It is beginning to work. Ranchers are opening their fazendas to tourists, who have the best chance anywhere of seeing the great cats.

  The night air cooled to the nineties and our four boats motored up the river in the dark. The glowing red eyes of caiman broke the surface of the shallows as we buzzed past. A Tapir slipped into the river for an evening swim, unfazed by our presence. Something nipped at her feet and she splashed to safety on the other shore, turning with a last querulous look. All the mammals seemed larger here: the Capybara, already the biggest rodent in the world, seemed giant in comparison to those I had seen on the Rio Negro or in Belize, like an overgrown Muskrat crossed with a huge rabbit. The Tapir, the River Otter, the Jaguar, all thrive in this world of plenty.

  Mateus spotted more Jaguars on our excursions than anyone else, and it was getting embarrassing, especially as some people had seen none. This has happened to me before—in fact, many times. I have uncanny luck seeing rare birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals wherever I go, so much so that others have asked to join up with me, as if I were a good-luck charm.

  The largest rodents in the world, Capybaras, take a break on a road in the Pantanal, Brazil, 2010.

  By the fourth day I had seen five Jaguars, while the TV crew and some Panthera board members had to depart without a single daytime glimpse. They did have a remarkable night encounter, however. A Jaguar with a cub entered the water and circled around a caiman like a cowboy rounding up strays. She then pushed the caiman toward shore, pounced on its back, crushing its skull, then flipped it over in the sand and ripped at its throat. With the cub trailing behind she pulled the carcass up the sandy bank. Alan was very excited by this sighting, as he had never seen such behavior in a Jaguar before. The cats are great swimmers, but she was clearly teaching her cub how to drive the reptile to shore.

  The fazendas are so extensive—sometimes they encompass a thousand square miles—that Jaguars can easily traverse them without being detected. Alan was concerned that with encroaching development along the cat’s full range, especially in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela, the animal would
be hindered from free travel and ultimately compromised in genetic diversity. He had seen this happening with Bengal Tigers in India. Jaguars were doing well—there were perhaps tens of thousands of them—but the time to protect their future was now, before dispersal routes were blocked. So Panthera created the Jaguar Corridor Initiative.

  In the 1980s when I was at Conservation Committee meetings at the Bronx Zoo, a biologist on staff named Chuck Carr was involved with a Central American plan to create a corridor for wildlife called Paseo Panthera. Alan and I admired the concept and spent hours talking with Chuck about it. It was a far-thinking idea, which was ultimately diluted in bureaucracy but had real value Alan never forgot. The Jaguar Corridor was a grander scheme, and one that would require decades to complete.

  Panthera hired a young woman named Kathy Zeller to map dispersal areas of existing Jaguars from Arizona to Argentina, and subsequently layer the maps with viable paths and areas of concern. Howard Quigley’s research uncovered surprising facts. Jaguars were moving through relatively small and densely populated human areas to reach their destinations, and not only at night. The Jaguar’s own predilection for nonaggression toward human beings is probably what has made it so successful as a survivor. It stealthily crosses human habitats without detection, not stopping to take on dogs or other possible aggressors. George Amato had moved his genetics and genome labs to New York’s Museum of Natural History, founding the greatest repository on earth of animal DNA—more than 100,000 species, from dinosaurs to the great cats. Alan’s wife, Salisa, helped him map the Jaguars genetically, exposing their family structure and health along the corridors of Central and South America.