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Save the jaguar - Part II
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...We were in the Miranda region of the south Pantanal, on a 37,000-acre farm known as Fazenda San Francisco, so named because the Brazilian owner, Hélio Coelho, met his American wife in that California city. Fazenda San Francisco has earned a reputation as one of the world’s best places to see wild jaguars, in part because its owners have been on the forefront of practicing land-management policies that help preserve the threatened cats. The money made from ecotourism — a growing business in the Pantanal — supplements the property’s revenue.
“Fazenda San Francisco is a good example of how you can have farming, ranching and ecotourism together,” Braun told us. In addition to hosting day and night safaris, the fazenda (the Portuguese word for farm) has an education center, dining hall, swimming pool, horse stables, hammocks and guest rooms outfitted with solar water heaters, compact fluorescent light bulbs and robust recycling services.
This fazenda’s management policies are environmentally significant because the Pantanal is an important anchor habitat, serving as home to an estimated 15 percent of all jaguars. Although jaguars once ranged freely from northern Argentina through much of Latin America and into the southwestern United States, their numbers have sharply declined. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists jaguars as “near threatened” and estimates there are fewer than 50,000 left.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has designated the Pantanal a World Heritage Site, meaning the international community has pledged to help Brazil protect it. Overall, the Pantanal includes some 75,000 square miles — an area larger than Bangladesh, mostly in Brazil but extending into parts of Bolivia and Paraguay — of wetlands, forests and grasslands, much of which floods during the rainy season. The Pantanal is more than 90 percent privately owned, and most of the property is at least partially used for ranching or agriculture, making it a difficult conservation target.
From 2003 to early 2009, Fazenda San Francisco hosted a research project on jaguars, Projeto Gadonça, led by Brazilian biologist Fernando Azevedo, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho. Although Azevedo declined to be interviewed for this story, citing demands of field research elsewhere in the Pantanal, his assistant on the project, biologist Henrique Concone, was on site. Concone explained that Projeto Gadonça researchers used motion cameras, radio telemetry, direct observation and analysis of scat, markings and other signs to measure the behavior of jaguars and their interactions with ranchers.
Concone said the researchers concluded that “the best way to conserve jaguars here is to enhance the management of ranches,” because the biggest threat to jaguars are ranchers who fear for the safety of the 8 million cows in the region. Projeto Gadonça’s findings suggest that relatively small changes in ranching policy can preserve big predators and improve ranch productivity at the same time.
“We decided to support Project Gadonça to better understand the habits of these cats and to find ways to reduce predation on cattle,” Carolina Coelho, the tourism director of Fazenda San Francisco, explained in an e-mail. “The jaguar is a symbol of nature, fierce and feared, and its conservation in this environment is a source of pride for us.”
Many South American ranchers assume cattle are a prime target of jaguars; actually, though, jaguars seldom attack them. Instead, according to the scientists’ research, jaguars in the Pantanal primarily dine on giant rodents known as capybaras, crocodile known as caimans and marsh deer, though they eat more than 85 species in the area, including those iconic anteaters. In fact, Concone says, jaguars are keystone species that help maintain healthy ecosystems; by preying on sick animals, the cats help reduce diseases that can spread to cattle, including the bacterial diseases leptospirosis, which causes stillborns and can kill calves, and brucellosis, which can cause spontaneous abortions. Studies show disease kills more livestock than jaguars.
But many ranchers are not aware of the facts of jaguar life. Although jaguars are legally protected in most of their range, the law is difficult to enforce across such vast territory, and there are plenty of hunters all too ready to bag a big cat. When researchers asked 50 ranchers in the northern Pantanal what they thought of jaguars, a mixed picture emerged, according to results published in the October 2005 issue of the conservation journal Oryx. Sixty-four percent of respondents said they could not tolerate jaguars on their land, although nearly three-quarters said they thought jaguars should be protected in general. Some 40 percent admitted that they would be happier if there were no jaguars at all, and 94 percent said they would like help in decreasing jaguar predation on their land. Thirty-eight percent ranked jaguars as a larger source of economic loss than floods, droughts, rustling or disease, despite strong evidence to the contrary.
Still, fortunately for them, jaguars are hard to kill. “They are often injured by hunters, and then wounded animals are much more likely to prey on livestock because they have a hard time catching their native prey,” Concone said. Also, jaguars are more likely to try to eat a cow or pig if hunters have shot native prey species for their own tables.