Carnivore conservation project - Emas National Park (Pantanal)

Brazil grasslands in the Emas National Park
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The 12 days I spent in the Emas National park working on the Carnivore conservation project were really great. It was hard work, we got up usually at 6:30 am and sometimes worked during the night till 3 am....(sounds like banking in the city (-: but is little bit different). I really enjoyed the people I worked with, both volounteers and brazilan scientists.

My highlights include:

I did not transform into spider man yet (-: but who knows....

preparing a live bait trap to capture carnivores such as maned wolves, foxes, pampas cats, ocelets ...
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- a 3 hour "macheta" walk in the forest to find a camera (the precison of GPS in the forest is around 50m which makes a big difference in dense forest)

- a night spider bath: during radio telemetry in the park, we drove through numerous spider nets that we were breaking with our antena, and as a result hundred of spiders fell on us....I did not transform into spider man yet (-:  but who knows....

- capturing an ocelot, a beatufiul wild cat with similar coloring as a jaguar...

captured maned wolf
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- the last night party (hopefully the video footage will not leak (-; )

- dinners: we had a great Brazilian cook that was treating us as in a Michelin star reswtaurant

if you have more time to read about the project, I quickly summiresed it bellow:

BACKGROUND

the team with captured maned wolf after "processing him" top row: James, Rachel, Janet, bottom row: myself, Valerie, Mariana, Justin
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So let´s start with the begining and explaining what the project is about.

Emas National Park is the main basis of the Jaguar Conservation Fund that was created,among others, by two Brazilian scientists passionate about jaguar conservation, Lenadro and Anah. They run also other jaguar related projects in the Pantanal and Amazon.

http://www.jaguar.org.br/index.htm

a rainbow next to our house, it was the begining of the rainy season and the weather was very variable
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Earthwatch is an NGO that supports scientific projects by sending volounteers to help the scientifists to collect data to support their reserach. Shell and other companies sponsor their employees to participate in those projects and this is how I had the chance to be here!

www.earthwatch.org

THE TEAM OF VOLUNTEERS

We were a team of six volounteers: Rachel, from HSBC in London, Valerie from HSBC in Canda, Janet from Barclays in London, Justin from HSBC in Australia and two oil&gas men (as they called us), James from Shell Canda and myself. Although all coming from the big business world, there was a great diversity in the team, in terms of age, nationalites, study backgroung and way of thinking and speaking (you cannot imagine the amount of time the British and Canadians argued about the proper way of speaking english (-: ). We got along really well and this made the experience even more rewading.

the brazilian grasslands (cerrado) often burns because of lightning but regrows at an incredible speed...it is also full of thermite mountains
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SCIENTIFIC TEAM

On the scientific team side, Leandro and Anah were little bit hands-off and the whole show was run by Mariana, a young veterinary who is doing her PhD focusing on the epidemiology of jaguars with relation to transmission to domestic animals. A simple way of describing Mariana is that she can do everythinhg: she drives the car like Michal Shumacher, she can repair a flat tyre, she knows how to study animals, she dances well foho...and I could go on. It was a great pleasure to work with her. She was supported by Samuel, a master degree student from Peru and Rafal, a Brazilian biology student. They were both good fun as well. In particular, Samuel was able to talk about anything, from South American politiscs to Japanese cartoon movies, and it was very interesting to discuss with him.

we were really lucky and captured an ocelot, a big cat with jaguar like colors
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OUR TASKS/DATA COLLECTING METHODS USED

We used several methods to collect data about carnivore animals, that play an important part in the jaguar food chain.

1. Animal trapping

In order to understand what animals live in the park, the animals are being traped using live bait such as pigeon (or pigs for jaguar traps). We set up 39 traps with pigeon in the park on the first day and one jaguar trap later on. Then we were checking the traps on a daily basis and processing the traps animals when required: taking blood and urine samples, measuring the animals, taking pictures of the teeth to estimate the age, removing parasiteses etc. We were also puttimg collars on captured animals with

working on the ocelot: measuring, taking blood sample, looking for parasites...
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2. Radio telemetry

We were driving around the park, day and night, with an antena to record the postion of animal with collars.

3. Cameras

We placed cameras around the park, those were triggered by heat and movement. We alos placed a video recording  camera at a jaguar trail in order to attempt to film jaguars.

radiotelemtry: tracking the position of animals who wear a radio colar
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4. Fauna observation:

every day we were going on 4x4 cars around the park and recording what animal we saw, recording time and GPS coordiantes, we did that also during the night with a big spotlight. It was a nice way to freeze to death in Brazil (it was cold in the night, I did not have any warm clothes and everything was accentuated by the speed of the car).