Our trip to the Pantanal has been extremely exciting. As we prepare to leave the Pantanal and head up into the mountains to see Duca's home (she is the teacher in Taboco) we look back on incredible once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
At Pousada Cabure we had the opportunity to ride out into the countryside to herd cattle and watch the Pantaneros as they lassoed and treated many calves for infection and parasitic diseases. We even got to watch them castrate several bulls (who were quite angry afterward, by the way). Back at the ranch they have a special way of driving cattle into two foot wide narrow corridors with several closable gates that they use to isolate the animals fro treatment and castration. All in all it was very violent and it is easy to see why many cowboys are maimed and killed each year. Each seems to have some type of “war wound” from their years of wrestling cattle.
We asked the cowboys about how many head of cattle are killed by Jaguars and Mountain Lions each year and they said about 30. They get no compensation from the government for their losses but told us that they do not go out and kill the cats because they realize how important they are to the health of the ecosystem.
We also cycled through several different projects with Don, Alexine and the other Brazilians. When working with Don we spent our days wading through the waters of the freshwater lakes called baias taking all kinds of chemistry readings like pH, alkalinity, conductivity, and so on. While walking in the water we had to shuffle our feet in order to scare away the caiman and anacondas. Students in the past have encountered anacondas in the swamps but (luckily!) we did not this time.
Don also had us catching fish with nets. The variety is amazing and many are just like the kind you find in the pet store, tetras, pacu, blood fin, and a favorite mato grosso. PJ caught a monster fish that we measured to be 27 cm with teeth like the piranha. Most people did not like catching the fresh water bugs as they were strange, like the water scorpion and stinging water beetle. Finally, we did plant transects to determine the types of aquatic plants and percent cover. The flowering aquatic plants are beautiful; when we found one that Don couldn't identify samples were taken for identification and classification in the lab. Molly revolutionized the sample collection scheme by creating a system to bag the samples in order!
With Alexine we spent our days tracking peccaries. Unfortunately, we were not able to catch any in our traps! We did, however, observe hundreds of both white lipped and collared peccaries during our time down here. We even got to see peccaries that had Alexine's radio collars on them. One day we got to use machetes to open up a brand new trail for here at Pousada Cabure. We had to be very careful, not just because the machete can be dangerous but because many of the plants have spines and prickers and there are a number of biting insects (the worst of which are tiny ticks smaller than the head of a pin). During an outing to check the traps Kelly and PJ saw a bunch of black howler monkeys swinging between trees.
Occasionally, we took the boat up the river to track peccaries and conduct a fruit census. Alexine is really interested in finding out the seasonal availability of fruits used by the animals here (especially the peccaries) and how this changes their feeding patterns between the wet and dry seasons. Twice we saw peccaries crossing the river, which Alexine says is rare to see. We even saw a Jabiru stork eating an electric eel! People come from all over the world to bird watch in the Pantanal, there are so many different species it is hard to keep track. At Pousada Ararauna we saw many Blue Hyacinth macaws which are endangered. Others included toucans, kingfishers, falcons and owls.
The overall objective of Don and Alexine's work is to study the impact of cattle ranching on the wetland ecosystem, grazing cattle have a profound impact on the numbers and variety of species of both plants and animals in the Pantanal. Don & Alexine also work with the cattle ranchers to develop management plans to more effectively raise beef cattle. Alexine's crowning achievement here is a pasturing process she developed that allows cows using the same amount of pasture land to have 30% more growth than cows that do not.
While working on the projects in the grasslands, waters and gallery forests of the Pantanal we saw many exciting things. We saw piranha, snakes (even a boa constrictor and a rattlesnake), coati (think cute brownish raccoon with a long lose and a ringed tail), white-lipped and collared peccaries, crab eating foxes, giant anteaters (several with babies), lesser anteaters, feral (wild) pigs, capybara, toucans (2 kinds), howler monkeys three types of deer (Brockett, Marsh and Pampas), Armadillos, an electric eel, Giant River Otters, three species of stork, a Trogon (beautiful bird), many amazing Macaws and other parrots of different colors Rheas (like and ostrich)…and that is just to name a few! Hopefully, through the research work that is being done here, this area can be saved for future generations.