International Jaguar Day

Written By: Gail Clifford | Published By: Weekend Notes |  Nov. 29, 2020

https://www.weekendnotes.com/international-jaguar-day/

You’ve heard of the Big Five: lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and Cape buffalo. You don’t find jaguars on the list since they’re the leopard equivalent in the Americas. But hunting them to shoot, with a camera, of course, can be just as difficult.

Enter the Pantanal. South of the Amazon Rainforest.

The Pantanal, encompassing the world’s largest tropical wetland area, located mostly within the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, south of the Amazon Rainforest, extends into Mato Grosso and portions of Bolivia and Paraguay. Named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, thousands of species thrive there, like jaguars, anaconda, red-footed tortoises, toucans, the imperilled hyacinth macaw, giant river otter and animals you’ve likely never heard of, caiman and capybara.

The majestic jaguar is considered an umbrella species, upon whose shoulders sit the awesome responsibility of protecting the habitat from extinction, simply by continuing to exist. It’s not easy to get there; flights from the US to Brazil’s Sao Paulo and then to Cuiaba, a city of about 3 million people. From there, motor coach and then safari trucks took us to Port Joffre, where you don life preservers then board speedboats. It’s a fun, fast 40-minute boat ride down the Cuiaba River to our Floatel, the floating hotel you’ll call home for the next week.

The conservationist who started the whole thing, Dr. Charles Munn, is an ornithologist by love and training. He learned quickly that saving the birds in this region would ultimately require saving the jaguars. He built an entire ecotourism industry around tourists viewing rather than shooting jaguars. It helps that guns are generally illegal in Brazil since the 1960s.