Sunday 21 October 2012

Boat ride and game drive

To beat the heat, the lodge likes to start breakfast around 6:00am and get to the day's activities by 6:30. Having gotten in relatively late the night before, we were impressed with ourselves for actually making it to the breakfast table on time. Or so we thought. Little did we know that it was daylight savings time. Fortunately, Stefan, the guy in charge of the lodge was in the dark as well. This worked out slightly less well for the couple who was catching a plane out of the area that morning, but seeing as how it was a 5-seater and they were the only ones charted to go, I doubt they missed it. With them gone, we were the only guests at the lodge, and we had two guides, Stefan and Sam, to ourselves.

The recommended activity of the morning was a boat trip down the Rio Negro (a little smaller than the Amazonian version). The theory here is that the proximity to water would keep us cool.


We used an electric motor on the way down river to keep quiet. The trick worked, as we quickly spotted a Neotropic Otter feasting on what looks to be a freshwater eel.


Next up, Caiman. These guys aren't nearly as vicious as they look. They eat fish and usually lurk in the water with just their eyes showing. As soon as one gets close, though, they dart underneath the water, where they can hold their breath for half an hour or more.

Here's a random photo of a river bank Ming took. Stefan says he has previously seen the other otter species here: the Giant Otter. If you look very closely at the photo, you'll notice that they are not in it.

The bird life on the Pantanal is spectacular, but there are too many names to keep track of. This bird is relatively common, but interesting nonetheless. According to the birdbook I just flipped through, this is a Grey-necked Wood-Rail.
Another common sight is the Yellow-billed Cardinal:


There are supposedly 19 different types of herons in this part of Southern Brazil. We saw a couple. Here's the Cocoi Heron in mid-flight.
This next bird is the Rufescent Tiger Heron. Pretty impressive neck.

After drifting down stream for a couple of hours, we hopped off the boat, where we tried to sneak up on a few Caiman.

Missed it:
Got 'em:
It was getting hot, so we boarded the boat and chugged back up the river using our gas engine.
The world's largest rodent, the Capybara, wasn't phased by our rumbling:


This is a rare shot of one actually moving:

Most of the time, they are just lying around.

After a while, it occurred to me that these creatures are the likely inspiration for the Wumps of Wump World. For the uninitiated, Wump World is the hipster's Lorax. It was a children's book espousing environmentalism before Suess made it cool.
When we got back from the game drive at 10am we took a nice long nap before lunch at 12:30, after which we took an even longer nap until 4:00 for the game drive.

It wasn't long before we got close to some animal life.

One of the first things we noticed is that the animals in this portion of the Pantanal are fairly skittish relative to the similar excursions we had in Africa. The reason for this is that Embiara is a family owned farm-turned-lodge that doesn't have the traffic of a major African safari-type establishment. The up-side of this is that you're getting a much more realistic sense of nature. The down-side is that this means you don't always see the animal you want to see. For example, Jaguars have been known to roam these parts of the Pantanal, but we pretty much knew coming in that the probability of running into one was miniscule. In the northern portions of these wetlands, on the other hand, Jaguars are pretty well habituated to the presence of humans (mostly due to baiting done a while back, a practice which has since been largely abandoned.) So those are your choices with respect to eco-tourism: 1) see what you want to see in a somewhat artificial environment, or 2) miss some of your favorites in favor of a more natural habitat. Of course, you could go with option 3, which our guide Stefan does: spend 6 months of the year in the natural habitat of your favorite wildlife and see what comes around. A few weeks before we got there he apparently ran across a mother Jaguar and her cubs playing along the very beaches we passed in the boat this morning.

For the game drive we had padded, open-air seating attached to the bed of a truck. The engine likely scared off much of the wildlife before we got close, but there was still plenty to see.

Sometimes the nest is more interesting than the bird. Here's a shot of the nest of some oropendolas (bird not shown).
These little locusts were everywhere... and actually not that little.
Peccaries and feral pigs are almost as common. The easiest way to tell these creatures apart is that the former has no tail.
Feral pigs are about the only mammal (other than cows I suppose) in these parts that aren't protected by law. They were brought here by portuguese settlers a while back, and have been digging up the soil and overpopulating the area ever since.

It's difficult to enforce any wildlife protection deep in the wetlands. Despite its illegality, farmers have been known to shoot Jaguars who threaten their live-stalk. Of course, the cats only go after cows when the rest of the animals have been driven out of their territory by the farmers. We've seen similar stories in South Africa and New Zealand. Funny how humans tend to turn the circle of life into a spiral of death.

Anyway, we saw some foxes coming down the road in front of us. Also in this photo you can see a small stretch of the miles and miles of fence that criss-cross the wetlands.
Most of the animals are able to get right through the fences. Except for the cows...
As the sun set our game drive, and our first day in the Pantanal, came to an end.





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