The River of Shining Jaguars
“Bright-faced and jazzed, the guides radio
Hurriedly: onça, onça, onça…and the jaguar
Strode, wide-bodied, magnificent…”
Today, I am in the northern Pantanal searching for jaguars. My boatman and I simultaneously spot two jaguars as they walk onto a fallen cambará tree—a female and her cub. I immediately recognize them as Hunter and Avi. For these two, I have mapped their lineage and know that Patricia was Hunter’s mother and Ruth was Hunter’s grandmother. Benny maneuvers the boat to 30 meters away and ties it to the bank; we watch as the mother and cub groom and snuggle each other. I am trying not to weep as I struggle to find focus through the wetness of my eyes. I have never seen such tenderness from such a powerful and gorgeous animal.
Nine years ago, on my first trip to the Amazon, I set up camera traps to photograph jaguars. They are impossible to see; so, this was my best option. I checked and rechecked my camera traps. For days and days, no luck. I had placed them carefully near the buttresses of great ceibas and left a bottle of rotten eggs and chicken feet for a scent lure. I crawled on my hands and knees to see if I would trigger the trap properly. It had been two weeks slogging through muddy trails and this was my last day. I was desperate. The cameras had to be collected.
The jaguar’s tracks led right up to the trap. I was shaking when I scrolled through the images. But there was nothing: the camera lens had fogged over and all I could see was a faint outline of ears. I sat on the ground and cried.
On the way back to camp, I was despondent. Torn up. All this work. All my dreams of photographing a wild jaguar ruined by humidity. My head drooped. Anselma, my guide, stopped short and whispered, “Onça.” Suddenly, there he was: a small male jaguar, maybe 75 kilos. The jaguar looked over his shoulder in shock and took off on a dead sprint through flooded varzea forest. Water curved in arcs behind him as he ran. It was the most beautiful scene I’d ever witnessed in the wild: his movement, his coloration, his joie de vivre.
Needless to say, I was hooked on wild jaguars.
The northern Pantanal of Brazil is one of the most fascinating locales in terms of jaguars, especially in the Parque Estadual Encontro das Aguas. Nearly the opposite of the Amazon, the habitat found in the Pantanal is a complex web of wetlands, grasslands, cerrado, gallery forests, deciduous and semi-deciduous forests. This magical combination of habitats, along with a cross-section of productive rivers, yields ample prey and excessively large jaguars. These jaguars vacillate between large and small prey depending on the season and the conditions. Many of these cats are unafraid of humans, often hunting in close proximity without fear.
We radio back in Portuguese to let the other boats know our whereabouts. I spent my time moving back and forth between my 400 and 600 mm lenses, carefully noting their behavior, their ease, their wounds. I am spellbound, lost in a blur of rosettes and whiskers and spots. I feel as if I am floating among them. Ethereal.
Strangely, I smell a slightly musty, musky odor. Hunter spies a caiman surfacing and rises to her feet. The caiman descends and Hunter lies back down. I notice Avi’s missing eye and speculate that it might be the work of Marley, the dominant male. The bite pattern is exactly the same size and shape as a male jaguar’s. I think Marley probably wants to drive Hunter into heat. I watch Hunter’s claws extend as she switches direction on the cambará tree. Her claws retract when she starts to nap. I wonder if she got the slight scar on her mouth from defending Avi from the rogue male. I wonder and wonder.
Voracious mosquitoes pull me from thought. There are boats coming in at high speed, but I don’t turn around, keeping my focus on the two jaguars. I contemplate jaguar identification and how the W forms a distinctive pattern on Hunter’s forehead, how her left side has a single black spot near the top of her back. Over 148 jaguars have been identified in this area so far. I am amazed that my presence doesn’t bother them. They have become habituated to humans. This all started many years ago when local fishermen fed jaguars piranhas by throwing the fish to shore from their boats. The jaguars learned not to fear humans and equated them to easy food.
I turn back 20 minutes later, and more than 70 ecotourists—with their tripods and telephoto lenses—fill 22 boats. There is the metallic clicking of endless shutters. Muffled talk. Coughing. Laughter. Boat motor exhaust. The ecotourists are all mesmerized by Hunter and Avi, but the feeling of connection and solace is gone for me. Benny and I decide to leave. I am overwhelmed by the volume of human encroachment.
We head off upriver and find four jaguars hunting in endless water and hyacinths.
A darkness descends and the Cuiabá River undulates with the twisting, turning bodies of bats feeding on a million insects. Egrets and herons roost in their quietude. The night air cools, almost giving me a chill as my sweaty clothes dry from the wind as our small boat approaches camp. My eyes are full of a myriad of images from a day of observing jaguars. All things, I was told, are beautiful, but some, I argue, are more beautiful. Kant speaks of the sublime and claims it cannot be found in nature, saying there is no end point to the contemplation of art. I once agreed with Kant, but now I would argue that there is no end point to their artful beauty, no end point to my contemplation of jaguars.