Jaguar Rivers of the Northern Pantanal

“You hear the capybara first. Then nothing at all. Then the bank moves.”

Three days on the Cuiabá and Três Irmãos rivers in a small boat, where the world's densest jaguar population hunts the banks.

The northern Pantanal in the dry season is the one place on earth where jaguars are routinely visible in daylight. You spend your days in a six-person skiff drifting the river margins, engine off, listening for the alarm calls of capybara and the crash of a caiman leaving the bank. Sightings here are extraordinary but they are also crowded, so we run early and late — on the water at 05:40 and again from 15:30, when most boats have gone in. Between sessions you rest at a floating lodge, sort images, and sit with a biologist from the local jaguar ID project who will help you match the rosette pattern of the cat you photographed against a catalogue of over two hundred known individuals. We keep a strict fifty-metre line, never cut a swimming animal off, and leave any sighting where the cat shows stress. Giant otters, hyacinth macaws, jabiru and the odd tapir fill every gap.