The Pantanal, lying in the geographical center of South America, is the largest seasonal floodplain on the planet, four times larger than the legendary Okavango Delta in Botswana and eight times the size of the Florida Everglades. In 1914, a little over a century ago, the Pantanal first came to the attention of the English-speaking world with the publication of Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt. The blurb on the back cover of modern printings of the book describes the contents with this tempting teaser. “After losing his bid for the United States presidency, Theodore Roosevelt decided to take on the most dangerous adventure left on earth. He and his son, Kermit, set out to plot the course of the River of Doubt. The river could have just as easily been named the River of Death. The expedition lost men, supplies, and canoes as they battled ferocious rapids and cannibalistic natives.” In 1997, I led the first Van Os photo tour to the Pantanal, and this past August I returned for my sixth trip to this enticing wilderness area. Thankfully, our tour, focused on the jaguars and other wildlife of Brazil’s Pantanal, had no ferocious rapids and not a single salivating cannibal. Nonetheless, there was plenty of exciting, wonderful wildlife to see and capture with our cameras.
Leaving the dock of our riverside hotel near Porto Jofre at 6 am on the first morning we were searching for jaguars, I was filled with giddy expectation. Would I see the mesmerizing golden eyes of an elusive jaguar staring back at me from the tangle of greenery flanking the banks of the Cuiaba River? I did not have to wait long for the answer. Within 45 minutes we had spotted not only a beautiful female lounging in the morning sunshine beside a quiet backwater pool, but she was being shadowed by a large amorous male named Bagua. In the next two and a half hours the pair mated 10 times, each coupling lasting less than a minute with intervals stretching between 10 and 25 minutes. To watch and photograph such intimate behavior by a large, secretive predator is a rare event no matter where you travel, but in the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil it has become a regular occurrence.
In my early travels to the Pantanal I never saw such exciting behavior, and on my last trip in 2015 I saw just one jaguar, a large adult male, momentarily walking along the shore of the Cuiaba River before he disappeared into the forest. Since then, a number of favorable changes have occurred that make jaguar viewing a more predictable and reliable possibility. Firstly, jaguars are not killed as readily by local ranchers because of the financial incentives of ecotourism. A rancher can now make much more money hosting tourists than he can from an occasional cow lost to a predatory jaguar. As the same time, ranchers are using more progressive methods to protect their cattle, especially calves and yearlings, so that jaguar attacks occur less frequently. Add to that that many jaguars have now become quite habituated to tourist boats and ignore them, even with their noisy outboard motors and boisterous tourists noticeably disturbing the quiet. And finally, the Pantanal has abundant vulnerable prey for jaguars to hunt including caiman, capybaras, peccaries and anteaters. All of these measures combined now make jaguar viewing in the wildlands of the Pantanal safe, easy, and reliable.
The two jaguar tours I led this past August for Van Os focused on three areas of the Pantanal: the riparian forests flanking the Rio Claro, the riverside woodlands in the Meeting of the Waters State Park north of the tiny fishing settlement of Porto Jofre, and the savannah forests on a cattle ranch in the northern Pantanal. Each had its own cast of critters offering us exceptional photo opportunities.
On the Rio Claro, we made three half-day outings. The local boatmen have so effectively habituated some of the wildlife that we were able to get stunning images of ringed kingfishers, cocoi herons, black-collared and great black hawks deftly plucking fish from the water’s surface within a dozen yards of our boats. Photographing fast-moving birds in flight can be a difficult skill to master but with practice everyone soon got reasonably good at it and many captured some amazing action shots. Once we were off the river we could continue to photograph the many species attracted to the hotel grounds including curious tufted capuchin monkeys, elegant chestnut-bellied guans and handsome bare-faced curassows. A favorite target on the hotel grounds were the flocks of noisy black-hooded parrots.
After our two-day stay along the Rio Claro we drove south along the only major road in the northern Pantanal. The bumpy gravel road, built in 1976 and containing dozens of short bridges meant to traverse flooded areas during the rainy season, is ambitiously called the Transpantanal Highway, but might better be called the rough road to rewarding adventure. In a typical November-
March rainy season in the Pantanal, the ditches beside the road get flooded and then during the April-October dry season these convenient roadside wetlands normally contain hundreds of caiman, and multitudes of wading birds feeding on the concentrated fish populations. Last winter the usual restorative rains failed to occur and this summer the Pantanal was in the midst of a drought, further aggravated by unseasonably high record temperatures often exceeding 100°F. Although such conditions occur periodically the failure of the winter rains may have also been influenced by the severe El Nino that occurred in 2023. Suffice to say, there were fewer wetlands than we expected to see during our ½-day drive southward, but the few that remained were filled with jacare caiman, stacked like cordwood along the shorelines as well as great numbers of hungry wading birds trying to capture the fish trapped in the shrinking pools. A couple of highlights included snail kites, a highly specialized bird of prey, methodically monitoring patches of floating water hyacinthe for apple snails incautiously loitering at the water’s surface, and the sighting of a 7-foot yellow anaconda that I was able to wrangle and bring to the road for people to photograph and enjoy. The yellow anaconda is a relatively large snake reaching lengths up to 12 feet and weighing as much as 120 pounds. It feeds mainly on fish, reptiles, frogs and small mammals. It is a smaller version of its gigantic larger cousin, the green anaconda, which is rare in the Pantanal.
After our morning drive on the Transpantanal Highway we reached our hotel located on the banks of the Cuiaba River next to the small settlement of Porto Jofre. The grounds of the hotel were our best location to photograph the delightfully colorful toco toucan, the largest of the 40 some toucan species that live in the American tropics. The toucan’s large beak is used primarily to pluck fruit, but also to plunder bird’s nests and to reach into tree holes inaccessible to other birds. Recently, researchers have learned that the birds may also use their large bills to dissipate body heat in the stifling warmth and humidity of the tropics. Knowing the interesting science behind the toucans’ conspicuous beaks made photographing them all the more interesting.
Our 6-night stay in Porto Jofre was meant to maximize our chances of seeing and photographing jaguars who can sometimes be elusive and secretive. For five days in a row we made early morning and late afternoon boat trips, exploring the rich network of rivers that radiate out from Porto Joffre. Generally, we spent 7 ½ -8 hours on the water each day, scouring the shorelines and following up on tips given by different boat drivers, all of whom were in constant radio contact with each other. Often the three drivers piloting our boats were the first to locate a jaguar, which gave us the best photo positions possible.
In both of the tours I led we had more than 30+ jaguar encounters yielding a rich array of behavior for us to capture. I like to categorize the different behaviors I see when I am working with a new wildlife subject. This helps me to appreciate the breadth of experience I’m capturing. In all, our groups saw a remarkable range of jaguar behavior. We saw grooming, stretching, and expansive yawns that plainly displayed the formidable canines that a jaguar uses to subdue its prey. We witnessed courtship and mating, scent-marking, tooth-and-claw squabbles over territory, underwater and shoreline stalking of caimans, and successful caiman kills by both solitary jaguars and a coalition of two male cousins, something that is extremely rare among jaguars other than those in the Pantanal where the high density of breeding females makes such unusual relationships possible and evolutionarily sensible. If that wasn’t enough, we also located a 12-year old mother who had a three-month old cub that she uncharacteristically guided to the river’s edge each day to drink. Normally, jaguar mothers keep their offspring hidden away until they are older and can escape from murderous male jaguars, but the high temperatures this season probably made the cats thirsty, motivating them to drink more than usual and delighting us with their riverside nursing and playful antics. My remarkable Brazilian co-leader, Paulo Boute, with 40+ years of guiding experience in the Pantanal, had never seen a jaguar cub so young, so we were lucky photographers indeed.
Naturally, after leading two tours to the Pantanal people ask me which one was better. I can honestly say they were roughly equal in excellence, with each having highlights of its own. Van Os has been running serious jaguar tours for over a decade and any tour that occurs during the dry season from July to early September has the possibility of yielding a wide range of jaguar behavior and photo opportunities.
After the excitement of Porto Jofre we headed back north for a two-night stay at a tourist ranch in the dry savannah roughly half way to Cuiaba. Once again, the drought conditions changed what I expected to see but rewarded us with unexpected photo opportunities. Because so many of the natural wetlands surrounding the ranch had dried up, wildlife moved closer to the ranch to take advantage of the few waterholes that were being maintained for the owner’s cattle and horses. This turned out to be a bonanza for us. Some of the highlights included troops of coatimundis, tropical relatives of the raccoon, crab-eating foxes, furtive Azara’s agoutis, herds of secretive collared and white-lipped peccaries, and shy South American tapirs. And then there were the birds: hyacinthe macaws, bare-faced curassows, chestnut-eared araceris, crested oropendalas, yellow-billed cardinals, and great numbers of crested caracaras.
In the end, my return to the Pantanal after a nine year absence was a wildlife experience beyond my wildest dream. I had hoped to see a couple of jaguars, and would have been happy if they had only been snoozing on a riverbank. But the jaguar behavior and encounters I and the groups saw were truly beyond belief. If you are looking for another big cat wildlife adventure that matches anything you might have experienced in Africa or India, then the Pantanal is for you.
