Just 10 feet from our safari vehicle, a female jaguar’s body is shrouded in palm fronds. She snaps the air with a loud snap as she bites the back leg of a dead cow. Lucas Nascimento Morgado is a young biologist working for an NGO that works with jaguars. Onçafari Here in the southern Brazilian Pantanal he grins with joy. He says, “This is an amazing sighting. My friends.” He’ll say this over and over again in the coming week, but it will always be true.
The Pantanal covers more than 42,000,000 acres in two states. Brazil, with flooding that reaches Paraguay. The presence of jaguars here predates the Ice Age, meaning the cats once hunted alongside saber-toothed tigers; they have since coexisted with Indigenous peoples like the Terena and the Guató as well as the cattle ranchers from nearby Paraguay and elsewhere in Brazil who began settling in the region 300 years ago. The Pantanal, which has suffered from climate change, has led to a decline in the panther population. In a land where, for years, it was viewed as an asset from which to extract sellable goods, the nascent jaguar population is a cause of concern. ecotourism The Pantanal can be protected with a tourism infrastructure, which will put more food on local families’ tables than ranching could. This is possible without putting at risk one of the great floodplains of the world.
In the early 1960s, the Pantanal was a place where big game hunters hunted jaguars and chaimans. This practice has since been banned. Brazilian city-slickers are still attracted to areas like Serra do Amolar, a mountain range in the western Pantanal. They’re more interested in wresting dorado from the water rather than learning about the flora or fauna. Only in the past couple of decades has the idea of ecotourism as a means of safeguarding the landscape taken root, with individual players prioritizing conservation on privately owned lands—meaning they can bypass the government, which hasn’t always encouraged such efforts. The ecolodge team CaimanPantanal is a place just outside of the dusty city of Miranda that has adopted this strategy. In March, when I arrive at the end wet season, flooded lakes are shrinking and the grasses are reaching the skies, making it easier for me to spot jaguars.
“Ten years ago there was more water,” says Mauricio Abib, a São Paulo–raised biologist and naturalist guide, on a game drive at Caiman. “The seasons were better balanced.” The trees twist and turn as if they were dancing a tango. The trunks of all the trees have a common characteristic: they are charred from the bottom up. In June 2024, a large fire spread across the area. Like many areas in the world that undergo extreme wet and dry seasons, the Pantanal has been experiencing more severe—and more frequent—natural disasters. Caiman had to evacuate guests because of the 2024 blaze. Many animals perished, and others were found with their paws melted from walking through the flames; the lucky ones were rehabilitated by Onçafari.
