"I'm usually down in the Pantanal during the dry season jaguar season when everything's just holding on, waiting for the first rains. From December to April, the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland, is flooded. The water is crystal clear, it's green, lush and beautiful. Then in June, the drought starts. Everything's brown. There's a mark left on all the trees of where the water level was. Everyone is congregated next to the major water sources, including jaguars."
"I've seen jaguars flipping around capybaras, jumping from trees for caimans. The encounters that always stuck out to me are the mum and cub because the mother is a cold-blooded killer. Then, when she's next to her baby, she turns into this loving will do anything for her cub type. In June 2020, the middle of the Covid lockdown, when I was living on this boat in the middle of the Caribbean, the worst mega-fire hit. I couldn't go there. I couldn't help."
Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and conducting research in Brazil's Pantanal, where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. The Pantanal is the world's largest tropical wetland, seasonally flooded from December to April and drying in June, concentrating wildlife near water during drought. In 2020 mega-fires burned roughly 27% of vegetation and killed at least 17 million vertebrates. Climate breakdown made the Pantanal drier between 2001 and 2021, increasing above-average fire occurrence. Martin reports vivid jaguar behavior, stark maternal contrasts, and personal distress during the June 2020 fires when she could not reach the region.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]