Modern Weights and Measurements of Jaguars

[Dark Jaguar]

Not sure if you guys have already seen this content. For those who have not seen it before its very interesting and informative. I've been working on translating this in a while and waiting the right moment to post.

First I'd like to say thanks to https://www.deepl.com/home for helping me with the translations and Google Translate too. I went over the details to make sure its accurate.

Not sure if this ( and my next ) post belong here or another different thread because there's actually more than weight and measurements on jaguars.


This is the dynamics and study on jaguars by George Schaller and Peter Crawshaw in the late 70's and early 80's from another point of view in that era other than the records of hunters from that time, jaguars tough lives back that time because of humans  and also the average size of a female Pantanal jaguar ( 75kg ) stated by Richard Mason himself as well as the heaviest male Pantanal jag caught by him back then and the weight of considered adult sized male Pantanal jaguar back then  and more.

note: Just reminding again Let's take in cosideration that all the further study content in this post took place back in the late 70's and early 80's and all the publications dates/months/year are from the source website bellow.

credits: https://www.oeco.org.br/


 Introduction

Onça-Pintada: 3 decades of scientific publications

Silvio Marchini*

Published in December 21st 2010  https://www.oeco.org.br/colunas/silvio-marchini/24666-onca-pintada-3-decadas-de-publicacoes/


Atlantic Forest Jag.

*This image is copyright of its original author

The jaguar occupies an exceptional position in the most diverse forms of man-made recording, from cave paintings to be printed on our 50 reais ( brazilian currency ) money note. In scientific literature however it has had a relatively minor presence. Only in the last three decades have scientists described the habits of jaguars in nature. Zoologist George Schaller founded the ecological literature about the species and currently his legacy is more present in Brazil than in any other country.

In 1978, George Schaller and José Manuel Vasconcelos published the article Jaguar Predation on Capybara ("Predation of Capybara by Jaguars"). The name of the periodical in which they published the article is almost unpronounceable to most Brazilians - Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde - but the publication was the result of research conducted in Brazil, more precisely in the Pantanal of Mato Grosso do Sul ( south pantanal ). With the article, Schaller and Vasconcelos founded the modern era of ecological literature on jaguars, both in Brazil and internationally.

Not that jaguars had not attracted the attention of scholars until then. On the contrary the largest and most fascinating terrestrial predator of our country has always been highlighted in the chronicles of the explorers and naturalists who ventured into the interior of Brazil. The first report on jaguars in the country dates from 1557 and was made by the German sailor Hans Staden. In his book Two Journeys to Brazil Staden reports that "there are also many jags in that land, which spoil men and cause much damage". The work of Staden and other explorers of the 16th century defined the tonic of what would be written about jaguars in the following centuries: their predatory habits especially when perceived as a threat to man and his domestic animals and their persecution by hunters and farmers. Among the naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably Rodrigues Ferreira, Spix, Wallace and Bates, the food ecology of the jaguar was also a recurring theme although descriptions of jaguar hunts deserved significant space in their chronicles.

It was precisely reports of hunting in Brazil more specifically in the Pantanal that dominated the literature on jaguars in the first three quarters of the 20th century. The first and perhaps most influential author of this period was Theodore Roosevelt. In 1913 the hunter and former president of the United States joined Cândido Rondon on an expedition to clear the "wild Brazilian west''. During his time in the Pantanal, Roosevelt participated in jaguar hunts, which he described the following year in his book Nas Selvas do Brasil. Another legendary adventurer who left a detailed record of his hunts was Sasha Siemel. Born in Latvia Siemel spent part of his life in the Pantanal where he gained notoriety as the only white man able to hunt jaguars with a zagaia (the zagaia is a long spear that must be held tightly by the hunter so that the jaguar when thrown on him is impaled). In 1953 Siemel published his memoirs as a jaguar impaler in the book Tigreiro! Finally in 1976 Toni de Almeida published the book Jaguar Hunting in the Mato Grosso and Bolivia. Almeida was a hunter and guide of hunting safaris for foreigners but had the habit of writing down the weight size and stomach contents of the jaguars he killed. He was the first to do that. As a result, his book provided the most complete information on the biology and ecology of jaguars in the Pantanal before Schaller.

 It is not surprising, therefore that Schaller chose the Pantanal to conduct the first scientific study on jaguars. Schaller came to Brazil in 1977 to study the ecology of the jaguar and its prey in a joint project between the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society - WCS) and the IBDF (now Ibama). In 1978 the Brazilian Peter Crawshaw became the national counterpart in the project. Together they were the first to use necklaces with radio transmitters to investigate the movement of jaguars. In 1980, they published the article Movement Patterns of Jaguar. In the same year Schaller moved out of the country leaving north American Howard Quigley in his place. Crawshaw and Quigley started working on a farm in Miranda and together they published several articles about the Pantanal jaguar between 1984 and 1992. Crawshaw continued his work on jaguars and today responds for more publications on ecology and conservation of the species than any other researcher.

It was only in 1986 that research on jaguars conducted in other countries began to be published. That year the North American Alan Rabinowitz published two articles on ecology and predation problems of domestic cattle in Belize in addition to the book Jaguar in which he describes his effort to create in that country the first reserve dedicated to the conservation of jaguars. Rabinowitz, who began his work in Belize in 1983 at the invitation of Schaller, laid the foundations for a long-lasting research program which today accounts for much of the ongoing research. Also in 1986, veterinarian Rafael Hoogesteijn published his first article on the situation of jaguars in Venezuela. Hoogesteijn was the author of several influential publications in the following two decades, among them the Manual on the Predation Problems Caused by Jaguars in Cutting Cattle. Together with other researchers also dedicated to the study of the ecology and conservation of jaguars on large cattle farms in the Venezuelan Lhanos, Hoogesteijn has made Venezuela one of the countries that has contributed most to the scientific literature on jaguars.

 Since the mid-1990s Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia and the United States have made important contributions. Other countries that have also produced publications are Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. In 1999, WCS and the National Autonomous University of Mexico gathered in that country 30 experts in jaguars, representing 10 countries including Brazil to present updated information on various lines of knowledge about the species. The results were published in 2002 in El Jaguar en el Nuevo Milenio, the largest compilation of articles on jaguars in a single volume ever published. Nevertheless Brazil the cradle of research on jaguars continues to be the country with the largest number of publications on the species. The expressive and growing number of professionals dedicated to research on jaguars in the country and the support of influential national and international institutions such as Pró-Carnívoros, Instituto Onça-Pintada, WCS and Panthera suggest that Brazil's leadership in research conservation and consequently scientific literature on jaguars will continue in the coming years. Thirty years later George Schaller's legacy remains more present in Brazil than in any other country.

* Silvio Marchini, Biologist Projeto Conviver Gente e Onças Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) University of Oxford.


Schaller in Brazil and the "Epitaph for a jaguar"


Peter G. Crawshaw Jr.


Published in June 9th 2014 https://www.oeco.org.br/blogs/rastro-de-onca/28399-schaller-no-brasil-e-o-epitafio-para-uma-onca-pintada/


The modern era in the study of carnivores in Brazil began with the arrival of biologist George Schaller in April 1977 to make the first study of the jaguar in the Pantanal of Mato Grosso. Here I use a text that I translated from George to tell a little more of this story. Published in 1980 this article tells the misfortunes that marked the beginning of our project with jaguars to which I formally joined in January 1978, as the Brazilian counterpart of the project through an agreement between the Brazilian Institute of Forest Development/IBDF (the precursor of IBAMA) and the Brazilian Foundation for Nature Conservation/FBCN.

After exploring areas in Central and South America, George chose for the study the Acurizal farm then an active cattle ranch located on the right bank of the Paraguay River where he is bordered by the Serra do Amolar the western edge of the Pantanal and border with Bolivia.

The original article "Epitaph for a Jaguar" was first published in Animal Kingdom Magazine, April/May 1980 and then republished as a chapter in the book "A Naturalist and Other Beasts - Tales from a life in the field", Sierra Club Books, 2007.


Acurizal Farm on the western edge of the Pantanal border with Bolivia.  Photo: Mario Friedlander, Collection of the Ecotrópica Foundation

*This image is copyright of its original author

I pass the word to George:



"Footprints in the mud told the story. During the night a female jaguar, protected by a bush by the bay had approached a capybara and jumped  killing her in an instant of violence, before she could escape to the safety of the water. Then, with the 35 kg rodent between her front paws, she lifted it up with her jaws and dragged it along the beach to the interior of the forest.

I followed the marks through sharp bromeliads like razors and thorny vines. One step at a time I went forward with my ears open. My eyes were trying to penetrate the vegetation striving to see the jaguar. It certainly knew of my presence, for the dry leaves on the ground in August made quite a noise under my feet. Perhaps she had abandoned her prey after a hasty meal, as jaguars commonly do.

Then, a few meters away a low continuous growl made me stop. Slowly I stooped down, hoping to see at least a glimpse of the luminous drawing of black rosettes on a golden background, beneath the shadowy bushes where she was hiding with her prey. But she remained invisible. Without wanting to disturb her any further, I turned back, once again frustrated in my attempts to see her. Several months ago, I was studying jaguars in Brazil at the Acurizal farm which covers 142 km² of the Paraguay River floodplain on the eastern side of the Amolar Mountain Range, a mountain range along the border with Bolivia.

During this time I had become familiar with jaguars on the farm but only in the distance through the tracks left by them along cattle tracks and beaches and examining the carcasses of their prey. It is not difficult to identify individuals by their tracks when only a few animals inhabit an area. The footprints of an adult male can be distinguished from those of a female by its larger size more rounded shape and by the greater distance between its fingers the footprints of a young animal are smaller than those of an adult and may be accompanying or close to those of a female. When two adult females occupy the same area it can be difficult to differentiate their footprints, but they usually have some characteristic that identifies them, such as some small peculiarity in the shape of the plant pad.''


Mother and cub

In Acurizal, I discovered that two jaguars an adult female and her cub, also female with an estimated age between 15 and 18 months hunted together in a forest area of approximately 40 km2. The relatively open forest provided them with cattle - their main prey on the farm - and denser stretches of secondary forest housed peccari poles, another of their most important prey. Gallery woods accompanied two streams that drained the mountain range and these sheltered other species of prey, such as deer (mateiro and catingueiro) and tapirs. The temperature was cooler ( more fresh ) inside the forest, and the jaguars often rested there during the hottest hours of the day. A third female visited Acurizal intermittently, her area partially overlapping that of the other two females. And finally a medium-sized adult male dominated not only the farm area but also extended his movements through the forests west of the mountains.

This land tenure system - with territories of neighboring females overlapping and that of a resident male including several females - is similar to that of other large lonely cats. Although they are part of a community where members monitor each other jaguars like tigers and pumas essentially live alone. Judging by their footprints, even the adult female and her daughter rarely associated. On one occasion, the male and the mother were walking together, perhaps because she was in heat/estrus. Peter Crawshaw my Brazilian colleague followed them to where they had killed a giant anteater - as a joke, apparently, because they merely bit the animal in the back of the head and abandoned it.

The morning after the female growled at me, I left the camp to explore a beach, between the water line and the forest, once again trying to find the jaguar. To my right was the Pantanal a floodplain of over 100,000 km2 which is partially flooded every year by the Paraguay river and its tributaries. This mosaic of forests, baths, lakes, and bays protects one of the great concentrations of fauna in South America. After a visit to this area in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "It is literally an ideal place where a field naturalist could spend six months or a year. Now sixty years later here I was in the Pantanal hoping not only to study its fauna, but also to encourage the Brazilian government to establish a national park here.


Jaguar banquet

Several black vultures took off from a capon where the female had dragged the capybara carcass. After eating only a part of the forequarters - the breast meat, the heart, the liver, and the flesh of a palette - she had left the remains. In this climate the capybara is edible for no more than two or three days, after which the meat becomes rotten and full of larvae. Still, the jaguars even when undisturbed spend only one night with each carcass. Perhaps food is so plentiful that the cats do not worry about their next meal, especially when their menu includes not only capybaras and ungulates but also a wide variety of other creatures: fishes, turtoises, sucuris (anacondas), caimans, quatis, otters and bugios ( howler monkeys ).

A cloud of flies followed me when I dragged the carcass from the capon. As always, the feline had killed the capybara with a precise bite to the skull. The jaguar takes the head in its mouth and with the canines opposite pierces the bone to the brain. This technique is noteworthy not only for the precision with which the canines pass through the bone in or near the ears, but also for the force required to penetrate almost an inch and a half of bone. Jaguars can kill even cattle by breaking the animal's skull with a primitive force unknown even in lions and tigers which usually kill large prey by asphyxiation.


Peter Crawshaw monitors tranquilized jaguar.  Photo: Peter Crawshaw collection

*This image is copyright of its original author

Each day thirty to thirty-five capybaras grazed along eight kilometers of beach where jaguars commonly hunted. What effect did predation have on these giant rodents?

To discover this we walked on the beach almost daily for two months, looking for fresh carcasses. The cats killed seven capybaras during that time, one-fifth of that small population. The impact of this predation was obviously so great that these rodents could not survive the pressure for long. However this result must be analyzed from a historical perspective. Many hundreds of capybaras existed in the region until 1974, when a severe flood submerged most of their habitat near the Paraguay River. The animals concentrated along the water where they soon began to die of disease - most likely African horse sickness, a form of trypanosomiasis.

The parasite for which these rodents are natural hosts remained in a latent state until the stress of overpopulation and lack of food made the disease virulent.
The region was still flooded during our study in 1977, and the disease still affected capybaras. Four animals in our sample were visibly weakened emaciated and covered with wounds, and several others appeared to be ill.


Arrest me if you can


Normally capybara populations can tolerate disease and predation because they are prolific breeders. Each female produces litters of up to eight cubs at least once a year but for unknown reasons few cubs were born or survived in Acurizal. Thus decimated by disease and hampered by a low breeding rate the population could not absorb the additional impact of predation. Fortunately for the capybaras the jaguars soon moved their hunting area to another part of the farm.

For details about the private life of jaguars, - their daily movement patterns hunting frequency and types of social contact - radiotelemetry had to be used. Capturing a jaguar and putting on a necklace with a radio transmitter should be easy I thought. It would only take hanging a piece of meat near a trail and camouflaging various snare traps around it to trap the animal safely and without posing a risk to it as bears and pumas are captured in the United States. The design of the loop is simple: the animal steps on a hidden trigger which fires a spring closing a steel cable on the feline's paw.

But the jaguars showed no interest in any of our baits dead or alive. In the mornings we found footprints headed straight for the trap site but they passed through them without even changing the stride. I tried to lure them with scent baits using the feces of another jaguar or sharpen their curiosity with a bird in a cage - without any result. Then changing tactics I eliminated the meat lures and carefully set the snares directly on the trails. The jaguars now stepped on the triggers but reacted so quickly when they felt the danger that they were able to pull their paws off before the loop closed. On the other hand, the loops worked very well with the cattle and releasing a 300 kg cow certainly provided very interesting moments.

Not only did the jaguars frustrate my attempts at capture they actually seemed to confront me: a female passed by our nets while we slept and a male put his prey - a capybara still intact - 90 meters from our camp. Although already angry I couldn't help but admire the animals' ability to crash. With its short sturdy head placed on muscular shoulders the animal gives an impression of strength rather than cunning and I had mistakenly underestimated it.


New attempts


Expedition with the dogs  for jaguar capture.  Photo: Peter Crawshaw Collection

*This image is copyright of its original author

Since my attempts to capture the jaguars with traps had failed, I decided to use traditional methods in Brazil to hunt these cats. In one of them the hunter floats silently in a boat near the shore at night periodically imitating the animal's husky and deep vocalization with a gourd. Attracted by the call the animal won't find another jaguar but the blinding beam of a spotlight followed by the deadly wound of a bullet. Another method is to chase the feline with dogs until he climbs a tree or acue in closed vegetation where he can be killed with a zagaia or firearm or according to my interest anesthetized.

Richard Mason an English foreigner living in Brazil owned the best pack of dogs trained to hunt jaguars in western Brazil where he used to take clients on expeditions until a federal law in 1967 prohibited hunting, affecting his business. He agreed to help me and arrived in Acurizal with five dogs and his mateiro Mr. Manoel Dantas with twenty-five years of experience as a professional guide and hunter in the Pantanal.

The master dog named Gigante, a castrated yellow mongrel walked in front sniffing the forest floor looking for a fresh track of the jaguars. The other dogs got excited pulling on their collars following the occasional bark of Gigante. Dantas then followed opening a trail with short strokes of his machete. "Hup, brriii," Richard would shout at intervals, stirred Gigante and let him know we were after him.

For hours on end then for days we traverse the entire area covered by the jaguars without finding any fresh footprints. During the months preceding the hunt we had spent some time at the Bela Vista farm north of Acurizal. Had the jaguars moved there in the meantime? I didn't think so. Where then were the adult female and her daughter?

One day we were in the remotest area of Acurizal, a shadowy forest in the narrow part of a valley between the mountains. Gigante was ahead - his barks saying he was interested but not too excited by some smell - while we followed slowly along the dry bed of a stream thinking of new areas to look for. Suddenly, Gigante yapped several times as if he were being attacked then silence.

"The dog was hurt! It could be a pecari, or even an jaguar!" yelled Dantas. We released the other dogs who were barking and they shot up the valley. Soon their barking merged into a continuous racket with only the resounding howl of Bagunça clearly distinct.


Sedated Jaguar


We hurried to follow the dogs crossing bromeliads with sharp thorns in a blind race to where they clustered around a tree leaning over the dry bed of a stream. Trembling with excitement the dogs jumped against the trunk and bit the hanging lianas. Lying on a branch about seven meters above the dogs there was chaos a young female jaguar strangely calm looking at us and the dogs. "finally we met" I said to myself. While I prepared a dart with a tranquilizer drug Dantas moved the dogs away tying them in a tree a few hundred meters from there.

As soon as the dart hit the feline's thigh we moved away to wait for the anesthetic to take effect. It then descended from the tree and disappeared into the undergrowth. Ten minutes later we followed her with just one dog finding her already sleeping at 100 meters.

To reward Gigante for his excellent service we brought him to the anesthetized jaguar. Even having the claws of the jaguar minutes before cut his body the dog just looked at the animal lying down without expression. We did not know then that this had been his last hunt that one of the wounds had produced an internal hemorrhage and that he would die later of infection.

"In other times, that animal would already be dead. I would already be taking her skin off" commented Dantas as we prepared to record her vital statistics. She weighed 70 kilograms and measured 167 centimeters from the tip of her snout to the tip of her tail. Its a small animal by Pantanal standards where jaguars are the largest in the world. Richard who had always carefully recorded hunting trophies told me that the average weight of a female was 75 kilograms and that the heaviest male captured by him weighed 119 kilograms. Peter and I then placed the radio."


George Schaller places a monitoring collar on a jaguar in the Pantanal in 1977.  Photo: Peter Crawshaw collection

*This image is copyright of its original author

Epitaph for a jaguar (part 2)
 
Published in June 18th 2014 https://www.oeco.org.br/blogs/rastro-de-onca/28428-epitafio-para-uma-onca-pintada-parte-2/


Peter G. Crawshaw Jr.


Monitoring of the small female jaguar in Acurizal July 1978.  Photo: George Schaller

*This image is copyright of its original author

The following text is a continuation of the first part of the article "Epitaph for a Jaguar" by George Schaller which narrates the adventures and misadventures of the first modern study on the jaguar done in 1978 by Schaller and Peter Crawshaw at the Acurizal farm in the Pantanal of Mato Grosso.

"One hour and fifteen minutes after the injection of the anesthetic, the jaguar staggered out of our field of vision still recovering from the effects of the drug. Although happy with the success of the capture I felt a vague restlessness that refused to take a conscious form in my thinking. Something did not fit: this animal was too heavy and its legs too big to be the young female from Acurizal that we had been following for months. And where was the mother?

A few days later our cook told us that in conversation with the wife of one of the farm's pawns she had learned that a jaguar had been killed in Acurizal the previous month. The death of even one animal would seriously affect the already small population and we were worried not only about the animals but also about our project.

Looking for more information Peter and I went to Claudio an employee who had shown interest in our study bringing small animals into our scientific collection and passing on information about footprints he found. We asked him about the dead jaguar. Mounted on his mule he looked over our heads at the distant mountains and said "I don't know anything, I wasn't with the entourage".

We then went to see João, a pawn ( rodeo guy ) with the wide and pleasant features of a Bolivian Indian. His eyes turned away from ours when we questioned him. "In some matters, I just have to obey orders," he spoke softly and turned his back.

Felix a long tangled bearded squatter was supporting a family with twelve people planting mandioca (cassava), bananas and other products.  "I don't know anything," he said spreading his arms wide pretending ignorance.  "I hunt a few deer, peccaries and armadillos.  but never jaguars.  I say only what I know."

Unable to break the conspiracy of silence we went to Filinho's shed, a fence contractor.  A pack of mutts with their ribs showing up announced our approach frantically barking.  Filinho listened to us and his eyes had no sign of regret when he frankly admitted "Yes, I killed the jaguar.  I have nothing to hide. I hadn't said anything before because you hadn't asked me".  He also said that Geraldo the farm administrator who occasionally looked after the interests of the farm on behalf of the absent owner had given orders to kill the jaguars. In Geraldo's opinion, cattle and jaguars cannot coexist.  "There is a saying in Brazil", he once told us: "You can't whistle and suck sugar cane at the same time".

One evening Filinho had surprised the adult female in the carcass of a calf and killed her with a shot of 22 ( a handgun ). He sold her skin to a mascot owner of one of the commercial boats that sell and buy products along the Paraguay River. The leather/skin of a jaguar sells for about 100 dollars that of an Ocelot sells for 50 dollars, that of an Otter for 30 dollars and that of a Caiman for 3 dollars. (Translator's note: these prices are from 1978 and do not reflect dollar inflation until/of today).

In the Pantanal there is legal protection protecting the fauna but little enforcement to enforce the legislation and illegal hunters operate freely with impunity. In São Matias Bolivia near the border with Brazil, a man named Otis Paraguayo operates a tannery to process the hides of animals hunted in the Pantanal. Alfredo dos Santos and his two sons travel openly along the Paraguay River in a boat from which canoe hunters penetrate the flooded areas and return loaded with hides. Besides them there are several other intermediaries whose names are also known.

A military patrol once seized Alfredo dos Santos with the boat loaded with furs/skins and handed him over to civilian authorities. A few days later he was free again all charges dropped. When questioned the officer in charge replied "I don't want to be a dead hero." The border laws operate in the sparsely populated lands of the Pantanal; piranhas are competent to make corpses disappear.

When we clarified to Filinho that he could be arrested for killing a jaguar, even if authorized by Geraldo he responded naturally: "Well, if I go to jail one day I will get released and come back. Then I can forget that I have children and I can shoot Geraldo''.

In the middle of the night one of the pedestrians named Joseph came to the headquarters where we lived. First he asked for ethyl alcohol used locally to drink pure or mixed with milk and sugar. Then he apologized for the schedule saying that he was afraid to be seen with us especially by foreman Aníbal. He had the appearance of a vulture and a corresponding personality; all the local residents hated him.

Like Acurizal many farms in the region had killed two or three jaguars in recent times. In Bela Vista five had been killed in 1974. Four years later the population had not yet recovered only four individuals remained in an area of 94 km². One hunter killed 37 jaguars on one farm over a period of 12 years then he killed another 68 jaguars on another farm over 8 years.

Employees routinely kill jaguars, professional hunters bring in foreign clients on illegal hunts and commercial fur/hide/skin hunters are responsible for an unknown number of jaguar's deaths. There are still those who try to imitate Sasha Siemel, a hunter who with a rifle or with a sword killed more than 200 jaguars in the Pantanal between the 1920s and 1930s. "It is impossible to kill all jaguars " a farmer once told me presumptuously. "Some animals will never be caught in the pigeons."

I could have told him that ignorant words like those were probably spoken also for the United State's passing doves and for the quagga, a zebra-like horse from South Africa which used to be very numerous but were extinct in recent times by man. But I have only emphasized that the jaguar has already been extinct or drastically reduced in large parts of the Pantanal largely due to the persecution by farmers over the past 25 years. No species in which the female has on average only one cub every two years can withstand such pressure. Unless this local attitude changes only with a large national park can the species be saved in the Pantanal.

The ostensible reason to eliminate jaguars is because they attack cattle. In fact they do attack although they are responsible for only a very small percentage of the cattle that die each year. In one municipality of the Pantanal the number of cattle has been reduced from approximately 700,000 to 180,000 in six years due to a combination of disease, flooding and lack of pasture. After severe flooding submerged the pastures for months on end. As a result of poor cattle management on many farms only one cow in four or five can raise a calf.

While working at Bela Vista Farm we captured an adult female jaguar and monitored her for two and a half months until her necklace stopped working. We had contact with her for 35 days. During this period she preyed on only one calf a rate equivalent to twelve head of cattle per year - a low percentage especially considering that part of the slaughtered cattle are wild or feral or would have died from other causes.

This female in Bela Vista also revealed interesting facts about jaguar movements. Keeping uninterrupted contact with her day and night we discovered that this supposedly nocturnal feline often walked through the forest in broad daylight, although she was usually more active soon after sunset and before dawn. She remained inactive probably asleep, for about 8 of the 24 hours of the day. The daily distance covered ranged from 2 to 12 kilometers. Sometimes she stayed for several days in a small area especially if she had prey there. At other times she would quickly go somewhere far away as if she had an appointment to keep.
I liked to monitor this female at night alone except for the radio signal that connected me for a hundred meters to her, the silent and still forest under a lint of the moon. Listening to the night sounds searching for substance in every shadow, I was filled not only with suspense but also with a sense of fullness.

We followed the female of Acurizal too but I did it more as an obligation without joy trying to collect information about the size of her territory. We knew that with the two other dead animals we would soon have to look for another study area. Still, this female provided us with rare moments of pleasure.

Once shortly after noon Peter picked up her signal as she was moving through a gallery forest. We followed her discreetly never close enough to see her only the directional antenna on the receiver indicated her movements. She came out of the cool shade of the forest and plunged into the blinding sunlight on small rocky hills with sparse vegetation of low, crooked trees. She kept a steady step suddenly turning and turning towards us, the signal increasing in volume until Peter said "I can hear the signal without the help of the antenna".

About 100 m away she stopped in a ravine between two hills and, as we later discovered, she rested near a small puddle. There she remained for all the relentless heat of the afternoon and she was still there, the placid and constant signal when the so-called melancholy of a jaó announced the arrival of the night. We all remained there, the jaguar, Peter and I together in the darkness. I made a bed of dry grass and slept for a while leaving Peter to listen to the signal at thirty-minute intervals. Except for brief periods of activity the jaguar slept too showing no movement during the night. With the first hoarse vocalizations of a group of bugios ( howler monkey ) at dawn she moved quickly along the valley, her signal getting weaker and weaker until the woods took her away.

At our request an enforcement agent visited Acurizal to investigate the death of the jaguars. He also confiscated the skin of the jaguar Anibal had hidden in his home. Now for the first time I finally found her - the young female who had eluded me in life. The leather/skin with her sad beauty, the empty eyes, the bullet hole... I didn't want to keep that memory. Was this animal really part of the past? Among certain Amazonian tribes the jaguar represents the sun, an immortal being who since the dawn of life has been the protector of all life including that of man, and when he dies he ascends back to heaven to restart once more the cosmic circle of rebirth.

"And so in George's sad and bitter words but holding on to a hope in the future, the first stage of the pioneering project to study jaguars in the Pantanal was concluded. In August 1978, George and I left Acurizal, he returned temporarily to the USA and I to São Paulo to await the birth of my second daughter Beatriz. In July while still on the farm in the darkest period of the project we had received the visit of a Brazilian-Swiss doctor, Dr. Jorge Schweizer with whom he was already corresponding. Aware of the unsustainable situation in Acurizal he took us on his plane Cessna to Poconé and Cuiabá to talk with farmers and IBDF authorities, to decide new directions for the project. Through negotiations between IBDF and the Secretary of Agriculture of the State of Mato Grosso it was decided that until the definition of a new research area to continue the study of jaguars, we would be temporarily established in the Cidade Rosa Exhibition Park, 11 km from Poconé, whose infrastructure with several houses at the time was idle. Pompously we changed the name of the place to CEPEFAUNA - Centro de Pesquisas da Fauna do Pantanal Mato-grossense. George and I combined our efforts to study some of the main prey of the jaguar mainly the capybara and the caiman along the Transpantaneira highway then still in the process of implementation between Poconé and Porto Jofre.

In the next article taking advantage of texts translated from articles originally published in English, I will take the opportunity to reproduce an article that had considerable repercussion when published in 1986. The article written by me counted on the resumption of the jaguar project already in its new phase in the south of the Pantanal and the use of an Ultraleve airplane to monitor jaguars equipped with radio collars in a pioneering experience with state-of-the-art technologies of the time in the study of these cats".


TO BE CONTINUED... Reply