In August 2024, I travelled to the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world, deep in the heart of Brazil. Its a vast landscape of rivers, lagoons, grasslands and forest, shaped by water and the wildlife that depends on it. Most of all, the Pantanal is famous for its jaguars. Nowhere else in the world offers quite the same opportunity to encounter these elusive cats in the wild.
But when we arrived, the Pantanal was facing an extreme dry season. In some places, no significant rain had fallen for more than a year. The landscape was parched, and the waterways had shrunk to a fraction of their usual size. Yet the lack of water was drawing wildlife together.
As the smaller ponds and channels disappeared, fish and other prey became concentrated in the remaining rivers and lagoons. Capybaras gathered along the water's edge, while lots of caimans filled the shallows. And where there is abundant prey, there are jaguars.
We spent our nights on a house-boat in the Pantanal, and travelled with small boats, slowly following the winding waterways in search of movement along the banks. The jaguars are remarkably well camouflaged, their rosettes blending perfectly with the vegetation and shadows of the forest. Then, suddenly, there would be a shape on the riverbank—a flick of a tail, a pair of eyes, or the unmistakable silhouette of a jaguar emerging from the vegetation.
The waterways of the pantanal offer a remarkable window into their lives. Jaguars here are powerful swimmers, completely at home in the water. We watched them patrol the riverbanks, resting beneath the trees during the heat of the day and moving quietly through the vegetation. In addition we followed some of the jaguars while crossing the waterways. Their prey was often nearby: capybaras grazing at the water's edge and caimans lying motionless in the shallows.
For a wildlife photographer, the Pantanal is an extraordinary place. The open landscape and waterways make it possible to observe these animals in ways that are rarely possible elsewhere. But the photographs are only part of the experience. Spending hours on the water, waiting in silence, watching a jaguar slowly make its way along the bank, creates a connection with the landscape that is difficult to capture in a frame.
The drought had concentrated life around the remaining water, bringing predator and prey into an increasingly small world. It was harsh, but it also revealed something fundamental about the Pantanal: everything here is connected to water.
And somewhere along those shrinking rivers, the jaguars were waiting.
