{blog_title}

The Pantanal is a truly amazing place for wildlife. It should come with a health warning for biologists (or any wildlife enthusiast): “WARNING: liable to cause heart palpitations and shortness of breath”. Here are a few of my favourite wildlife encounters, and there are more photographs on my Brazil flickr set.

Capybara

I saw a lot of capybara which—-on many occasions—-were very close by. Once, I heard a loud rustling of the leaves below the boardwalks of the hotel. At the time there was a maintenance guy working on the structure of the boardwalks, and I thought for a moment that someone had come to help him. But it was a group of about 15 capybara, strolling about and completely oblivious to the man hammering and using a power drill about 5 m away from them. After dark, they would often sit on the bank of the river, on their haunches like dogs, just looking at the water. Eventually, they would all haul themselves to their feet, and one by one they would slip into the river. Capybara are rodents (really big rodents), and they twitter constantly to one another like guinea pigs.

Troupials

Troupials are the most orange bird I’ve ever seen. Their plumage is made up of highly contrasting patterns of black and the shade of orange usually seen on fluorescent safety jackets. The first time one swoops in front of your binoculars, you nearly fall over with the impact of the sensory overload. They also have a very distinctive and easy-to-imitate two-note whistle, so you can have fun whistling like a troupial and hearing them respond. This probably annoys the hell out of them, as they look around fruitlessly for the phantom troupial that they can hear calling. But if you can’t mess with the mind of a troupial every once in a while, what fun is life?

Agouti

I saw a little agouti (possibly the same one) several times. They are quite shy, but if you sit quietly for a while in the right place, eventually one wanders past. They make a noise out of all proportion to their size, and when you hear one coming through the undergrowth it sounds like a small tank. If you’re quiet (as I was), you can get a good look at them before they spot you and barrel off into the forest at a furious pace.

Marsh deer

In the UK, deer are pretty flighty. To get close to them, you generally need to be very stealthy, wear tweed and crawl around on your belly over a freezing moor for hours on end. Not so in the Pantanal. The marsh deer (the largest of the deer in the Pantanal) seem to be fairly blasé about humans—-especially the stags. Sometimes they run, but mostly they stand around grazing as you watch quietly, even turning their heads obligingly so that you see their antlers to best effect. I saw this one while walking back to the hotel, initially just as a pair of antlers sticking up above the reeds. It had a smooth-billed ani perching on them, and was trying—-unsuccessfully—-to dislodge the bird by tossing its head. The ani had obviously found a comfortable and convenient perch, and wasn’t going to be shifted. I try to avoid being anthropomorphic, but posing for females and rival males is basically what stags do, and this bird seemed to be destroying the dude’s mojo.

Black howler monkeys

Howler monkeys were wonderfully easy to see at the place we were staying. At least a couple of times a day, you could see them lounging around in the trees, munching leaves or idly plucking fruit. Even if you were unobservant enough not to notice them in the trees, you couldn’t fail to be aware of their auditory presence. As their name suggests, howler monkeys howl. Or rather, they make a noise like a convention of Tuvan throat singers with laryngitis, followed by a gurgle that sounds like the last of the bathwater draining down the plug hole. They do this at scarcely imaginable decibel levels, often at about 5:30 am. The first time you hear it on waking—-even if you think you’re prepared for the experience—-your first thought is that the end of the world has arrived. After the first unsettling experience, you more or less get used to it, and it becomes quite pleasant. There’s a meditative quality in its wordless repetition that’s very soothing to listen to walking outside just as dawn is breaking, or even better to let wash over you in bed as you surface from sleep. At any rate, it certainly beats being woken by trucks rumbling past or police sirens, which is my usual wake-up call at home.

I made a recording of the howl on my camera, so you can hear it for yourself. I’m afraid it’s a WAV file, but Quicktime plays it without any problems. I promise that there’s no electronic trickery in the recording. The real thing sounds just like that, but much louder.

One morning I was showering and noticed a buff coloured lump on a the branch of a tree through the screen window. I wondered idly if it was a female howler monkey or an owl or similar bird that I hadn’t seen yet. When it reached out an arm for a leaf, I saw it was a monkey and caught myself thinking, “Oh, it’s just a monkey”. Then I did a bit of a mental double take. Just a monkey. Through the bathroom window. The Pantanal does that to you after a while. You become blithely casual about the most amazing of wildlife sights: 100 caiman? Yawn. Darling, I don’t get out of bed for less than a giant anteater and a jaguar a day.