Wow. Just wow.
We drove today to Porto Jofre, a former fishing resort on the Cuiaba River that is now the starting point for boat trips to look for jaguars. The dirt road from Pocone to Porto Jofre is 100 miles long with 120 bridges over the places that become streams or flooded during the rainy season. We drove about 70 miles of the road today. With two years of drought, most of those bridges are over dry ravines with parched plant life. But periodically some water and marsh remain, and those spots are teeming with life, including the beautiful marsh deer pictured below. At another spot, we saw about a hundred Wood Storks roosting in the trees.
We thought that the weather would cool a bit as we traveled southwest, but it was hot and dusty all the way; good thing this is early spring and not summer! We left on our first boat ride mid afternoon, and we knew that it could take many hours over several days to see giant river otters, let alone a jaguar. Within the first hour we saw a whole den of otters, and then a mother jaguar with two nursing cubs!!! Unbelievable.
On our trip back at sunset, we saw two different kinds of fishing bats swooping all around our boat. What an amazing day, and we have two more days filled with sunrise and sunset boat rides yet to go. Our boat rides are in an open skiff, which gives a very different perspective on some of the water birds, for example the 4.5 foot tall Jabiru shown below.
No comments:
Post a Comment