This post has been a long time coming. In August, we headed south to the Pantanal area of Brazil, the largest contiguous wetland in the world. Our primary goal was to see jaguars—and there were plenty of sightings—but there’s a whole host of other amazing creatures there as well (birds, caimans, river otters, giant anteaters and buffalo, to name just a few). And while the area takes its name from the Spanish word for bog or swamp (pantano), there’s a diversity of flora that you’ll pass by as you float down the Cuiabá and Paraguay rivers.
We spent 11 days in the Pantanal, traveling with Oryx Photography. We split our time between the savannahs, where we went out each day on a safari vehicle to search for cool things to photograph, and the river, where we lived on a houseboat and took twice-daily motorboat trips to explore. This is just a snapshot of what we experienced. You can see even more photos from the trip on my Flickr page.
The hyacinth macaw is the totem animal of the Pantanal—and one that’s a huge draw for tourists (for obvious reasons). There are more than 7 million caimans in the Pantanal, and almost none of them care that you’re there. They’re a favorite prey of the area’s fiercest predators: jaguars.” I had no idea how much I was going to love the capybara, aka the world’s largest rodents. They were everywhere, but the best sighting was a family of them, including two babies. They scampered around on the beach while mom and dad got frisky in the water, trying to make more capybara (while a third party looked on). It’s a jaguar! We had a total of 23 sightings in our four days on the water, which is a huge amount. While they’re not at all tame, they are inured to the presence of humans and won’t shy away from doing typical jaguar stuff while you watch, like cleaning themselves, hunting, swimming and—most popularly—sleeping. Giant river otters are adorable, and we were lucky enough to see a handful almost every day. And the noises they make! You can hear the squeeks and whistles and vocalizations in this video here. There was this one spot in the river, a tiny island–Otter Island, we creatively called it—where they’d gather to sunbathe and roll around in the dirt. I could have watched them all day. One day, we spent hours on the river photographing birds as they dove for piranhas and flew away. We were trying to cement that moment in time when there was a splash of water, a flying bird and an easy-to-see fish. The keys are focusing on the right place at the right time, using a high enough shutter speed to freeze the motion and panning with the bird as it flew away. Easy, right? Not for me, but I ended up getting a handful of shots, including this one, that I think worked really well.
This is a marmoset, one of the types of monkeys that live in the Pantanal. They were very photo shy, dodging their heads or racing up a tree as soon as you’d raise your camera and point it at them. Difficult but cute. I call this one Jesus tern, for obvious reasons. This was the result of a half of an hour of Russian photography roulette (for me): shooting at night, using a flash and panning to follow the bird, like we did with the herons earlier. Reviewing my photos, I saw crap exposure after crap exposure—and then came upon this one. Bingo. An Amazon kingfisher, perched along the Cuiabá river. Big cats: They’re just like house cats! This little guy—literally, it’s a pygmy owl—was hanging out in a tree at one of our first ranches in Mato Grosso. The trick was finding a position where the background could be blurred out to make the bird pop. Coming around a spit of land in the river one day, we were startled to see a pair of water buffalo lazing in the shallows. They’re not native to the area but were introduced in the mid 1700s; now there are an estimated 5,000 of them. This one pulled a Bo Derek after I photographed it and slowing slid its way out of the water. A tiger heron spreads its wings, perhaps drying them in the sun before taking flight. The jabiru stork (jabiru means “swollen neck” in the language of the Tupi people) is another iconic animal of the Pantanal. They’re quite numerous; we even saw a trio of babies sitting high up in their giant next, being fed by one of their parents.
