The Elusive Jaguar
Searching for jaguars in Brazil`s Pantanal is quite the adventure. Most of them are found in a reserve that is situated on an island. This means that to get there you need to take a six hour boat ride — at top speed. Now that you have travelled so far, you will stay on a houseboat outside of the reserve for five nights. While there are obviously no guarantees, there is no mistaking that you are there to see jaguars and that is your primary goal. To accomplish these you spend eight hours a day on a boat circling the island.
We spent two full days and three nights there without seeing a jaguar.
It was warm and windy, although hot and calm are the best conditions for seeing jaguars. On the third day I was getting a bit desperate, but the weather had changed for the better — it was close to 40 degrees. Never having seen a jaguar in its native habitat, it`s very difficult to know what you are actually looking for. At one point, Stefan and I saw an animal walking the edge of the jungle — it might have been a capybara — but when we moored we saw it was a female jaguar! She was beautiful and to our delight was with a male partner; our guide had only seen two jaguars together once before. We could hear them wandering around and while they allowed us some pictures, they wouldn’t stray far from the vegetation.
This was early in the morning so we continued on. The only time you are allowed to get out of the boat is during the one bathroom stop at lunch where everyone else stays in the boat and you face towards the jungle hoping for the best! Of course emergency breaks on the boat are easier for guys, but not quite so glamorous for girls! Our third sighting was probably our best one in terms of photographic opportunity. He looks like the roughest of the bunch and had been in a huge fight. He stayed at the edge of the trees letting us observe and take photos — he even turned his back on us to sleep! Later that day we spoke to the rangers of the reserve and they were unaware that this male was even in the reserve. Of course we had pictures to prove it.
After seeing three jaguars in one day, we were ready for a new adventure and used our last day to travel the lagoons outside of the reserve. This allowed us to see some new things, such as an amazing Wood Stork rookery. Just before lunch, a boat came up to us explaining that they had just seen a jaguar along the beach.
The chances of seeing jaguars outside of the reserve were small, but we rushed over anyway. It had been scared off, which was disappointing. But our wildlife luck stuck with us, and we soon found our fourth jaguar — outside of the reserve!
Each jaguar has a unique series of spots on its forehead so that you can tell them apart. We saw a total of four different jaguars, and each encounter was equally as unique!
