In the Land of the Jaguars

I was prepared to wait, to soak up the magical morning light as our small motorboat traveled up the Rio São Lourenço in the Pantanal, Brazil’s vast wetlands. A tangle of lianas, acuri palms and strangler figs pressed close along the riverbank. I stared into the forest, scanning for movement, for shadows, for a jaguar. But it was too soon.

Patience in the wild is a lesson I have learned over a lifetime of travel. On an African safari, for example, it can take days to spot a cheetah or a leopard.

But in Brazil, we had been out on the river for barely half an hour when the cry went up from Gabriel, the captain: “Jaguar!”

And there he was, a magnificent male sunning himself in the reeds. I expected him to flee. But as we pulled up to the riverbank, he remained watchful but inscrutable, giving no sign of being disturbed. Farther upriver, we happened upon a female jaguar with her cub. As they walked along the riverbank, the cub eyed us suspiciously, but for the mother it was as if we were not even there.

Close to the center of Brazil, the Pantanal begins south of the city of Cuiabá. From there to tiny Porto Jofre (about 160 miles), the MT-060 and the unpaved Transpantaneira Highway unfurl across the world’s largest wetlands, passing savanna and forest, ranches and eco-lodges.

At Porto Jofre, the highway ends and motorboats take over, with guides and local captains, many with their own Instagram accounts, ready to take you upriver to look for jaguars.

It was late November, the end of the dry season, when I arrived, and Porto Jofre was barely a pinprick of human presence, with a handful of lodges, camps and houses surrounded by rainforest. Families of capybara, the world’s largest rodent, had taken over the airstrip. Hyacinth macaws screeched overhead.

Over the days that followed, I would wake before dawn in the simple, palm-shaded surroundings of the Jaguar Camp, run by my guide, Ailton Lara, and we would head down to the riverbank, where each sultry morning, with rain on the near horizon, a few fishermen cleaned their morning catch. The flotilla of tourist boats during the June-to-September high season was already a distant memory.

But even on these quiet mornings, there were still boats setting out with visitors, heading as far as 60 miles upstream in their search for jaguars. They usually don’t have to travel that far, finding what they’re looking for in the Encontro Das Águas (Meeting of the Waters) State Park, less than an hour upriver from Porto Jofre.

I had been drawn to Mr. Lara, 44, and his Pantanal Nature tour company, by his soft-sell approach. One of the Pantanal’s most experienced guides, he had been exploring the network of rivers for decades. For him, it was all about the jaguars. If I wanted to join him, that would be wonderful. If not, he’d be out there anyway, looking for the animals.

I had Mr. Lara and Gabriel to myself. After our first two sightings of the morning, we eased from the main river into a creek called Corixo Negro. “This is ground zero for jaguars,” Mr. Lara said.

As if on cue, beyond a family of giant otters, a female jaguar, cub in tow, launched herself from a branch overhanging the water’s edge and onto an unsuspecting caiman in a violent commotion of water. With a handful of other guide boats alongside us, there was an audible gasp from amid the whir of camera clicks. The female jaguar, magnificent in the golden light of morning, emerged from the water, a small, writhing caiman in her jaws. I looked around at Mr. Lara. Like all of us, his eyes were shining, as if seeing wild nature for the first time.

This section of the northern Pantanal has one of the highest jaguar densities in South America — about three for every 39 square miles. But when it comes to actually seeing jaguars, it hasn’t always been like this.

Beginning about 20 years ago — after decades of hunting, poaching for skins and retaliation for the occasional loss of livestock, all of which drove jaguars into hiding — a combination of government protection, a rise in tourism and early eco-tourism projects resulted in an increasingly friendly relationship between humans and jaguars. Over the years, the jaguars have become used to the boats and the camera-toting humans in them.

“Human-jaguar conflict is disappearing around this area of Porto Jofre,” said Mr. Lara. “We are starting to live in harmony with jaguars.”

It’s an unusual situation. “Jaguars are normally very shy and avoid the human presence,” said Fernando Tortato, the Brazil conservation program coordinator for the wildcat conservation nonprofit Panthera. “People say that the jaguar is like a ghost living inside the jungle.”

But not here. There is an unlikely intimacy between the animals and the guides, who have given the jaguars names — Ousado, for example, a male whom Mr. Lara named, whose paws were burned in recent wildfires; Patricia and her cub; bent-eared Marcela, amber-eyed and pregnant.

It helps that in the northern Pantanal, there are no sizable towns — Porto Jofre, with a transient population of perhaps 100, has neither a gas station nor a shop within 100 miles. And the riverbanks are filled with jaguar prey: caiman, capybara and tapir, as well as birds like black-backed water tyrants, and the menwig frog, which blends in perfectly with the brown leaf litter on the forest floor and has a call that sounds like a Formula 1 engine.

“Jaguars here are doing so well,” said Mr. Lara, “because there are so many different species they can eat.”

As long as certain rules are followed — tourist boats should keep a respectful distance, observe jaguars in silence and allow the animals space to hunt and swim — the jaguars are largely unaffected by visitors. In fact, tourism has deepened the knowledge of jaguar behavior.

With so many eyes on the jaguars, new behaviors have been observed: The jaguars have learned to stalk caimans by swimming underwater and surfacing suddenly alongside their prey; males are forming coalitions to hunt cooperatively.

“They are there recording everything and observing the jaguars every day,” said Dr. Tortato. “It’s a kind of citizen science. Just one WhatsApp video can be the start of new research.”

Challenges ahead

The Pantanal may look like a jaguar paradise, but threats remain. On the last day of my trip, the Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul state governments announced plans to build a bridge across the São Lourenço at Porto Jofre, where a road would cut through forest and wetlands to the regional city of Corumbá. In their announcement, the state governments — which did not respond to requests for comment — justified the move as a means of furthering eco-tourism by connecting the northern and southern Pantanal regions.

Local activists, scientists and tour operators are against the project.

“This road is going to increase traffic, which will inevitably increase roadkill,” said Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist and conservation director of SOS Pantanal, a nonprofit that opposes the road. “The Pantanal will lose its wildness and isolation.”

Mr. Lara echoed his concerns. “Building a road could kill the Pantanal,” he said. “There will be more people, more trucks carrying soybeans, more construction.”

Even without the road and bridge, the Pantanal faces challenges.

Last year, fires burned one-quarter of the Pantanal, and a drought led to the lowest water levels ever in the Rio Paraguay, part of the network of rivers upstream from Porto Jofre. A landmark 2023 study of plans to dredge the Paraguay River to enable cargo river traffic found that the project posed an existential threat to the wider biome. Just 5 percent of the Pantanal is officially protected.

And as ever in Brazil, the political winds that pit ranchers against conservationists are never far away. Even in times of relative peace, the two coexist uncomfortably: A sign welcoming visitors to Cuiabá describes the city as “Capital of the Pantanal and Agribusiness.”

For now, the region’s isolation and growing fame as the world’s best place to see jaguars are keeping it safe.

Back on the river for the last time, we watched Marcela, the pregnant female jaguar, stalk and attack a caiman in the river shallows, carrying it into the undergrowth. Soon, her meal finished, she re-emerged and took to the water. We followed at a distance for more than an hour, until she disappeared.

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