Our second foreign trip of the year was to a favorite and familiar country – Brazil. This time, the birds took second priority as you can tell from the name of our tour: “Jaguar Spotting”. The group tour was again with Field Guides International, and was led by one of our friends and favorite guides, Marcelo Barrieros. It was a smaller tour, with only five participants besides us. It got smaller, too, in a way – one of the other people got COVID on our second day and had to stay in her cabin for several days after that. Luckily, our distancing and masking prevented it from spreading to anyone else.

We began the tour in Cuiabá, the capital of the state of Mato Grosso and center of a metropolitan area with over 1 million residents.  We enjoyed a first day on our own at the Parque Estadual Mãe Bonifácia, a large urban park we could see from our hotel room. It celebrates a woman (or perhaps an urban legend) who was a Black healer and helped escaping slaves in the 1800’s. It also holds lovely birds and Black-tailed Marmosets.

The first several days of the tour were in the southernmost end of the Amazon ecoregion, at a family-run lodge called Jardin da Amazonia. Great birds there included Blue-and-yellow Macaws, Orange-cheeked Parrots, and Cone-billed Tanagers, the latter an endangered species that was only recently rediscovered.  Populations are limited because of the birds’ narrow habitat preferences, which are largely the perimeters of oxbow lakes.  However, we had excellent views of a singing bird in a lake formed from the Rio Claro.

We then drove back through Cuiabá and southwest to the Pantanal. This is the largest freshwater wetland in the world (over 42 million acres); we were in the northern part of this ecoregion. We began sampling the abundant birdlife at our first stop, Aymara Lodge, getting great close-ups of Hyacinth Macaws, Bare-faced Curassow, Sunbittern and Great Rufous Woodpecker, among many others.

We followed Brazil’s Transpantaneira Highway to its end at the Rio São Lourenço, stopping frequently along the way to observe the abundant water birds and lounging caimans in the waterways.

At the end of the road is the Hotel Porto Jofre, where we spent the next 3 days. This was originally built as a fishing lodge (for the famous peacock bass) and now also offers birding and nature tourism. In a rare conservation success story, tourism focused on jaguars has now become so popular that jaguar poaching has been almost eliminated here. Working in ecotourism is now more profitable and a more successful long-term business option than poaching. Also, since so many people work in ecotourism, if you were a poacher, your friends and family in the tourism industry would likely turn you in since your poaching threatens their livelihoods.

Every morning and afternoon here, we went out in small 8-person boats to look for jaguars, as well as birds and other animals. It was unseasonably cold with temperatures in the low 50s, so riding in a motorboat before sunrise was a definite challenge.

We were very lucky and saw five individual jaguars! Ousado (“Bold”), shown below, was rescued from the fires that engulfed the Pantanal in 2020. When he was released back to the wild, he was fitted with a radio collar – the only jaguar in this area to have one. We got to see him several times as he walked along a bend in the river.

A second interesting jaguar sighting was a female, Marcella. We watched her catch a caiman and drag it onto the bank to take to her kitten, hidden somewhere in the vegetation. The downside of jaguar tourism’s success is that the crowds are massive. We counted 21 boats at one of these sightings, with everyone pushing and shoving for position.

A third fascinating encounter was a pair, with the male obviously trying to attract the interest of the female. We watched their interactions along the riverbank and finally also saw them mating.

At the end of our tour, we went back to Cuiabá for a huge meal at the Churrascaria Aeroporto Grill (imagine an enormous buffet, and then add waiters cutting big hunks of meat for you at the table). Then we all flew back to São Paulo and said our good-byes there.

We were glad we didn’t have to go home quite yet, though. We flew with Marcelo north to Manaus. It’s the capital of the state of Amazonas and center of a metropolitan area with about 2.7 million residents. Today’s city was founded by the Spanish in 1699 at the place where the Negro and the Solimães rivers join to form the main stretch of the Amazon. Its heyday was during the rubber boom of the 1890’s. We were told (on an earlier trip) that the wives of the rubber barons in those days sent their gowns to Paris to be laundered between opera performances at the Teatro Amazonas.

This time, we got in late, spent one night in Manaus and then kept going in our rental car. We made short trips in all four directions from the city. The goal was to observe the sometimes striking differences in bird life on the north and south banks of the Amazon River.

First, we went east to Itacoatiara. We birded in several types of forest and by boat to Risco Island. Highlights on the island included Plain Softtails and Orange-fronted Plushcrowns.

Next, we went west to Manacapuru, crossing an impressive bridge spanning the Rio Negro, stopping first at a lodge catering mostly to day-goers from Manaus, and then continuing on to Novo Airão, both in the area between the Solimães and the Rio Negro. We birded forest areas and took a boating excursion traversing a lake in Anavilhanas National Park on the Rio Negro itself.  The birds along this part of the river are unique.  Around the perimeter of the lake, we found the Varzea Schiffornis, a somewhat rare Amazonian species confined largely to such habitats.  We were lucky to stay at a lovely ecolodge in the town of Novo Airão, our headquarters for exploring the rainforest surrounding the town   There we were treated to a flock of birds attending a swarm of army ants, a characteristic of lowland Amazonian forests.  The most spectacular attendants were a pair of Chestnut-crested Antbirds.  Of course, we gorged on delicious Tambaqui fish dinners everywhere!  

Our third excursion, to the south, began with a ferry crossing of the Amazon where the two rivers meet. The Rio Negro drains an area of ancient rock (the Guianan shield) and has almost no sediment so its water is clear but dark due to tannins from decomposing leaves. The Solimães, on the other hand, drains the Andes, which are much younger and higher; there is much more sediment washing down and the water is white and murky. This means the “Meeting of the Waters” is very dramatic. Water from the two rivers flows side by side here for about 4 miles. It’s not until about 60 miles downstream that they are fully mixed.

We explored a few forested areas, then got onto a small boat for the drive to the Pousada Amazon Rainforest Lodge, another fishing camp (now empty of fishermen) located on an arm of Lago Maçarico (Sandpiper Lake). We had the place to ourselves since it was not peacock bass fishing season. We took boats through rivers and lakes and then walked along trails in several forested areas. Though the birding was quieter than we’d hoped (and there were no ant swarms) we still enjoyed Red-headed and Blue-capped Manakins, Cinnamon-rumped Foliage Gleaner and Spot-throated Woodcreeper, the latter two denizens of undisturbed rainforest and a couple of our target birds.

Our fourth and final route was to the north of Manaus. We returned to Presidente Figueiredo and the Aldeia Mari-Mari Lodge, where we’d stayed on a past trip. This place has a wonderful Cock-of-the-Rock lek – a place where the fantastic-looking orange males dance to attract the females. It was nice to be back. The owners (who we met last time) have now moved away, so the lodge has declined some and there are fears it will be sold to someone who won’t protect the lek. Things were a little quiet, but we still enjoyed the Cock-of-the-Rock performance and managed to find some life birds, perhaps the most exciting being a visit by a pair of Lined Forest-Falcons.

On our last morning, we drove from Presidente Figueiredo to Manaus, then flew back to São Paulo, where we said good-bye to Marcelo. Our flight from there to Dallas was a direct overnight flight, so we arrived back at DFW around 5:25 a.m. the next morning.

Brazil is almost as large as the entire United States (3.3 million square miles for Brazil, 3.8 million for the US) and is larger than the continental US (3.1 million square miles). This means even though this was Karen’s 7^th trip and Terry’s 8^th, there are still many more places to visit. So ‘tchau’ to Brazil for now!