On the trail of the Jaguar....

On this our third day in the Pantanal, Louis and Frankie weren’t overly excited about the trail walk.  Seeing animals on a horse, boat or from a land rover takes less apparent effort, regardless of the greater excitement you might get from being close to an animal on foot.   Nevertheless, as we headed out after another very early breakfast, there was an air of anticipation for Jules and I, we were hoping to see perhaps a tapir, or even a jaguar.  From the boys’ perspective? Well they just wanted to see another antlion. (For those of you - like us until yesterday - who have no idea what this is, it's a small creature that, when at the larvae stage, sets a fatal trap for unsuspecting ants. Look out for Frankie’s entry under “Animals we have seen” coming soon - it's a grisly end for the ant!

Minutes into the trail,  Alyson was showing us jaguar foot prints.  We’d seen these on our previous trail walk, so this wasn’t initially a cause for great excitement, however he explained that these looked very fresh.  And very big.  We continued on and realised that given these prints were clear and undisturbed, the jaguar was likely to have been the most recent visitor on this path.  Alyson looked at the distance between the paw prints, and estimated the size of the body, adding that the tail and head would make this jaguar one of the biggest he would have ever seen here. 

Alyson estimating the trunk length of the jaguar...

As we gingerly continued down the path, Alyson beckoned us off the path at a tangent to the left.  Every now and again he’d hold his finger to his lips to advise silence.  That was normally the trigger for some urgent whispering on the boys part, but that’s another story.  Had he seen something? We crunched our way forward (its really hard to be quiet on a bed of dead leaves) and after a couple of minutes, he pointed upwards.  We looked up at the empty tree, wondering why he had taken us here, there were very clearly no jaguars up there.  He whispered, pointing again “A Great Potoo”.  Then I saw it, this very strange looking bird, a mere 3 metres above me.  A grey mottled colouring resembled a sort of owl made from newspaper papier mache, except before it has been painted.  I remembered the reverence and excitement of the group at REGUA with whom we’d seen a potoo the other night.  They were still talking about it hours later as if they’d been in the front row at a rock concert.  And that was a smaller one, on a fence post 100 metres away in the dark......... 

After getting pictures from every conceivable angle, and repeating the process once it actually opened its eyes slightly, Alyson motioned for us to move on. We’d heard a strange knocking and he pointed to tall tree where half way up, there was a capuchin monkey hitting the tree with presumably some sort of nut or pod it was trying to open. Clever. 

Hairy poo gave us a cloo......

Returning to the main trail, Alyson stopped to look at some droppings.  Fresh, very fresh, they even LOOKED warm.  He poked them with a stick which revealed them to be somewhat hairy inside.  “These are jaguar droppings, he’s eaten something like a peccory, this is its fur”.  He added that it meant he probably wouldn’t be hungry for a while.  The prospect of being merely mauled as distinct from mauled AND eaten didn’t reassure Louis very much who suggested that we should turn back. When we encouraged him to continue with us “because we are here to spot a jaguar after all” he reluctantly continued, but decided to start sending secret messages to the jaguar to keep away, by being as noisy as possible with his walking stick.

Barely 20 metres after the droppings we noticed a patch of very wet sand. Alyson gazed slowly around, as if trying to second guess which route the jaguar might have taken. This reinforced his view that we were just minutes behind the jaguar.  In fact, Alyson surmised that the jaguar was probably taking a pee while we were photographing the potoo.  We remain divided in the family as to whether that was a good thing or not!!

So here’s the closest we got to photographing a jaguar.....

7th September 2012