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Jaguar tour - Mike Lane (UK) |
Full time wildlife photographer Mike Lane is specialising in birds and mammals. The following trip report is also published on his website.
 | August 2007
Our guide had seen this all many times before, but was clearly delighted. His face filled with a wide grin. He had achieved his objective and was a happy man, although it had taken longer than expected. This was our third day, but on the river bank only 20 metres away was a male jaguar staring curiously at the human visitors to his domain, totally unfazed. |
Julinho had his first big cat experience as a 5 year old accompanying his grandfather on a jaguar hunt armed with spears. By the age of just 15 he was a guide and today provides photographers with their best chance of photographing jaguars in the wild.
| Not many years ago nearly every decent jaguar photograph was taken in captivity. Zoos in Belize and Ecuador providing the best setting and access. In recent years however tourists have been returning from boat trips in the Amazon and Pantanal wetlands with perfectly acceptable images of wild cats. |  |  | In the Brazilian Pantanal especially jaguars are thriving. Although protected for many years in a wetland area as large as the U.K. and mostly inaccessible there was no way to enforce the law and ranchers regularly killed jaguars. It was hard enough to make a living from cattle without losing a few to this largest race of this elusive cat. |
However in recent times cattle rearing has become unsustainable in the area and many ranches have either closed or turned to ecotourism and now see the jaguar as an asset to their land. As a result the Pantanal is teaming with this large cat and attracting a growing number of tourists to see them. In turn the cat is becoming ever more tolerant of the tourist boats and seeing wild jaguar today is probably no more difficult (or easy) than seeing wild tigers in India. Both require an element of luck.
 | We had been close to this cat for 30 minutes now our cameras whirling away as the cat just purred back. Julinho had told us what would happen when we first saw a cat.
He would not stop, but continue to motor past as if we had not seen it. This would give the cat confidence that we had not seen it. 50 metres later he would turn the boat around and sail back pulling up upstream of the jaguar on the opposite bank.
From here we would drift with the current past our target. He would then repeat the exercise using the motor to go back upstream and drift back quietly a bit closer each time, making a judgement from the cats behaviour on how approachable it would be.
Within 10 minutes we were as close as we wanted to be. |
Over the remaining 3 days of our trip we saw several sightings of Jaguar. On two occasions I was amazed that Julinho was able to get us up close enough to photograph on foot after mooring the boat on the bank.
The cost for two photographers was $1500 each person for the week. This includes collection from the airport at Cuiaba, all transport including the boat, first class accommodation at Port Jofre, food and guiding.
Although Julinho can cope with larger numbers two is probably the ideal number. Any more and he would have to rent a larger boat.
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