Homage

On 17th March I wrote in praise of Collar Wali, the grande dame of Pench, who saved my tiger tour by wandering along a road in front of all of my jeeps. Though thirteen years old, and the mother of five previous litters, this lovely lady was clearly heavily pregnant and it was expected that within days she would give birth.

Collar Wali, queen of Pench, by Graham Nuthall

News comes to me today from Central India (via the strange miracle of Facebook) that Collar Wali's four cubs (which I knew were well, from a video I saw a couple of months ago) continue to grow strong. The words in the article speak for themselves. For my part I simply bow my head in homage to this gorgeous cat and to the dynasty of tigers she has mothered in a Shere Khan's Seeonee Hills.

News from Pench, reproduced without permission

The plot thickens

You may recall the state of play when we left our protagonists in Brazil a week ago. Handsome young Adriano (think Jake Gyllenhaal) was peaceably lapping water from a river in the dusk. Lithe and lovely Patricia (Jorge's sister, Ruth's daughter, remember?) was languidly draped through a tree at a bay's edge. Meanwhile battle-scarred, ear-dented Peter (John Wayne in one of his later movies) was cheating on Bianca (with whom he had been mating two weeks earlier), breaking the heart of his clearly gay young stalker Cage (seen many times with Peter this season, including just hours after Bianca left him for his infidelity), and having his way with Ruth on the high bank of a river above a den of giant otters. (Ruth, if you recall, was deceiving Peter about her intentions: later we saw that she was clearly suckling young cubs.) Estela, strange-faced and equally worn by a hard life (I'm thinking Streep at her battered best, certainly not Mamma Mia), we left gazing wistfully over a bend in a river from a sandy bank in the evening.

Are you comfortably seated? Because what follows is sure to shake you to your core, not to say titillate the parts that others of the larger cats can't reach.

All week, since Wednesday, including today, Peter has been seen mating in the open by the Black Bay, close to the floating hotel. Who is the object of his dappled amours? Has the rift with Bianca been patched up? Has he returned to Ruth, owning his paternity of the cubs? Has he surrendered to the youthful masculine charms of Cage? Not a bit of it. Peter has spent the entire week mating Estela, our square-muzzled friend from the beach. Don't believe me? Here, courtesy of my Naturetrek colleague Karen Souza, is the proof. Can't say three-timier than that.

Peter and Estela by Karen Souza

Some three-hundred metres away from this scruple-free couple, yesterday a purer love was unfolding on the same bay's shore. A love between two spotless (metaphorically, obviously) young souls brought together by the poetry of the riverbank and the sad hooting of the undulated tinamou. Here, as immortalised by my talented friend Naun Amable, is the first timid loving of Adriano and Patricia, two ingénus of the Brazilian forest.

If anyone has seen either of these two waving tails with any other jaguar, I categorically don't want to know about it. 

I have to believe that love exists.

Adriano and Patricia by Naun Amable

Two days and three jaguars

15th October

It's always difficult, on a jaguar tour, to decide not to look for jaguars, but to go instead to look for hyacinth macaws. Lurking in your mind is inevitably the thought of the fabulous jaguars others are seeing. In part it pained me, and it pained members of my group, but this morning we went to Pousada Piquirí and spent two hours in awe of these tremendous blue birds.

Hyacinth macaws by Helen Pinchin

Hyacinth macaws by Naun Amable

On our return to the floating hotel I rushed to my colleagues Quique and Marcos, in a bid at damage management. What jaguars had they seen? How well? None. Not a single visitor had seen a jaguar all morning. The only jaguar seen was by the hospitality manager Xaviera on her trip to a meeting in Porto Jofre.

Phew.

So in the afternoon we went in search of jaguars. And who should find jaguars? Why, those who went to Pousada Piquirí to look for hyacinth macaws found two young females on a beach by the Piquirí river. By the time the news came we ourselves had gone much too far in the wrong direction to turn around. We could not reach the jaguars in daylight. We would have to find our own. We did not; and we missed an excellent encounter with two most beautiful cats.

As we drew to our mooring at the floating hotel in the evening, just as I turned to tell our group what had happened, to break it to them gently that we had missed these two jaguars, our brilliant boatman João veered from the hotel and tore at full speed upriver, to the only beach visible from our rooms. There in the dusk, the nacunda and band-tailed nighthawks hawking the start of the night around him, lay panting a massive, handsome, youthful male jaguar: Adriano. He turned, he lolled his tongue, then silently he came to the shore, just metres from us, and drank. We stayed with him until dark and mosquitos drove us back; our day without jaguars saved by a motor's thrust and the lapping of a big pink tongue.

Adriano drinking in the dusk by Naun Amable

16th October

As we set out for the river on our last safari this morning, João again turned at speed and raced back to the Piquirí, upriver to where yesterday's slender females had been found again: the tenth and eleventh jaguars of our tour, the sixteenth and seventeenth of my Big Cat Quest. One of these gorgeous girls came to a beach from the forest and, like Adriano yesterday, she drank. Her frame, her gait, the graceful curve of her head and neck, were of a leopard, with only her big black rosettes marking her as a jaguar. She stopped to drink a second time, then lightly trod across the sand and into cover. We left the river, for Porto Jofre, for SouthWild Pantanal (where I write in the comfort of a cool room on a powerfully hot day), all of us elated, uplifted by what we had seen: not least, among many beautiful things, eleven spectacular spotted cats.

Mick Jaguar by Helen Pinchin

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    17
puma Puma concolor                                    14

Patricia

This afternoon began and ended with Patricia. Sister of Jorge and daughter of Ruth, at the start of the afternoon she lay in the shade and did nothing. Much later, on our return from the river to the Black Bay, she slumped on the trunk of an overhanging tree and slept, her huge paws dangling like a leopard's, her face lazy, content.

It was miserably hot on the river this afternoon and my month-from-home eyes struggled to stay open; but in the dying light of the day a great cat lay on a tree's trunk over water, and I was there: as I have been privileged, beyond the power of words to tell, to have been there to see at least 160 cats this year.

Mick Jaguar this morning by my friend
Naun Amable

Ruth at lunchtime by Naun Amable

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    14
puma Puma concolor                                    14

Purple prose

Sometimes I hate this blog. I hate getting back from a long hot morning, tired and covered in sweat, horsefly bites, and the residue of sunscreen, and having to think what to say. More than that I hate reading what I wrote the day before: the purplish, repetitious prose, the flat, tired-minded images, the banality of it all. It is hard to describe 155 cats and more in a year and still come up with new words, new phrases, new ideas. After nine months watching cats I'm worn. My words too I fear.

So sometimes I hate this blog. And then this morning happens. News comes of a jaguar on the Cuiabá, so we turn in the river and speed back. Round the next bend is a single boat beside a beach; and on the beach, striding confident in flawless morning light, a different jaguar, a male jaguar with his right eye sunken and lost. One of the best-known and most-loved jaguars here, he is the star of a YouTube video of a cat killing a caiman. His name, I regret, is Mick Jaguar.

The sound, these days, of a thrilling wildlife encounter, is the chatter of Nikon and Canon. The thrill may be measured by its intensity. This morning the cameras chattered and chipped without rest for minutes on end as this muscled mass of dappled cat walked the beach, his beach, and wove through the tangled trees which tumbled into the water. He went up to the bank, and - in a pose which outdid the many jaguar photos from Belize Zoo which are strewn across the internet - he came up from behind a massive fallen tree and stood on it, his one good eye assessing the river and his camera-clicking subjects.

We saw him for many minutes more, moving through the mesh of vines, palms and saplings on the top of the bank, sitting again and looking. Finally leaving, into the forest, bound who knows where.

The jaguar-watchers left too. After all on the Cuiabá there was still a jaguar to see. This was Ruth, the female we half-saw on our first day here. Today we all-saw her, dropping from the bank to the water's edge, nudging through the floating mat of hyacinth in search of caimans, sending a family of loudly sneezing capybaras swimming in panic across the river. We all-saw her today, her sagging belly and swollen teats. She clearly has young cubs somewhere near, and was just as clearly tricking Peter the other day, who in turn was cheating on Bianca.

I have not even mentioned the six giant otters this morning, preening and playing in the eddies, the piping-guans eating clay, the howler monkey mothers hauling their young through the trees like backpacks and bumbags. So here I am, sweaty, bitten and coated in sunscreen, mind tired, words purple and repetitive, blogging again, walking the same worn wordy circles around cats. Utterly astounding cats by a hot river in Brazil.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    13
puma Puma concolor                                    14

Sun, heat and jaguars

With the sun came the heat and with the heat came the jaguars. The first we saw was a female, at the back of a bay, behind a mat of water hyacinth preventing our closer approach. She sat on the bank and looked about her until - this was twenty past eight - the heat of the day was too much and she took to the shade of a tree.

There were Pierid butterflies, lime, yellow and white, along the water's edge and caimans basking on the sand. Large-billed terns cut through the blue and petrol-glossy greater anis waved their huge tails across the river. The capybaras chomped at the growing grasses, their nonchalant eyes fixed on the far distance. A distance holding jaguars.

Our second this morning was a male, identified later from photos as Hero. He has not been seen here in months. He lay in the shade as we sat in the sun, admiring his blotches and spots and craning for a view of his face.

(Hero, as it happens, was in the bay where my last group once saw Maxim, and where we also saw our last unidentified jaguar, which we knew not to be Maxim as we had just seen him elsewhere. As unlikely as it is, it is not impossible that the unknown jaguar two weeks ago was Hero. I'm therefore not counting him as a new individual on my Big Cat Quest.)

This afternoon the heat was fierce but we sat in the river by Jorge, a three-year-old male jaguar (son of Ruth, whom we saw courting Peter yesterday). He was dozing in shade on the riverbank, stretching at times, yawning, dozing again. Overhead moved hundreds of cliff swallows, a few bank swallows, arriving from North America. Around us skimmed South America's native southern rough-wings and white-winged swallows. And on the opposite bank capybaras grazed, unaware of the threat to their lives in the forest's shade.

News came of a new jaguar nearby, but we stayed with Jorge, looking, alone on the river, into his pale, implacable eyes as the day aged and the shadows grew. With fine photos taken we sped at last downriver to the beach on which a female jaguar had been found. Estela sat on the sand, piercing the lengthening shadows with her gaze. Then the band-tailed nighthawks came, and the greater fishing bats came, and the orange light of sunset came, and the time came for us to come home.

Crane hawk yesterday by my friend Naun Amable

Jorge this afternoon by Naun Amable

Estela this evening by Naun Amable

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    12
puma Puma concolor                                    14

A different river

It seems a different river in the Pantanal to which I have come with my group from Chile; so many things have changed since I was here two weeks ago. Beside the Transpantaneira yesterday almost all of the waterholes were dry, their egrets, herons, storks depleted, flown in search of water and of food. Here at the river the busy swoops and swirls of southern rough-winged swallows are joined by many barn swallows now. On my last trip I saw just one.

The beaches are vegetated too, with lush cane-grasses, and Ludwigia in lovely yellow flower; their sand-loving lapwings, plovers and skimmers are pushed to the edges, bereft of habitat as the season turns. In the overhanging forest there are greater anis, in numbers, where before I saw none.

It is cold too: unseasonably so. When I was here last I would soak a shirt sitting still. Now I am cold in two fleeces. For an hour this afternoon it was warm enough to wear only one fleece, but soon the moment was gone.

The jaguars are as inconstant as the weather and the season. They've been much less seen since I left. One jaguar's inconstancy - at his genes' behest - was clear to us today. Last time I saw Peter he was courting Bianca. Today, for a brief while in the forest, we watched him courting Ruth. Like Bianca she snarled his advances away.

The weather, the water, the birds and a jaguar's love: they're all inconstant here along a river in the Pantanal. Tomorrow, perhaps, there will be sun and jaguars. And smiles.

Cold Naturetrekkers watching wildlife in the Pantanal

Yacaré caiman

Giant otter, from one of two families we saw today,
by my friend and co-leader Naun Amable

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    9
puma Puma concolor                                    14

For Dan

My friend Dan in the Naturetrek office has never seen the big hairy armadillo. It was kind, therefore, of my friend and client Helen to send him this photo from yesterday, just to make sure he knew what one looked like.

Big hairy armadillo (at low resolution)
by Helen Pinchin

He's never seen a huemul either - in fact very few people get to see the huemul - so it was kind of Helen to give me a photo of the splendid male in velvet which we saw today, close to the Grey Glacier in Torres del Paine. For Dan's sake, obviously.

Male huemul (at low resolution)
by Helen Pinchin

This evening we are in a different world. There are southern giant petrels on the ocean just metres from our hotel and in the street in Punta Arenas there are noisy cars. We are far from the culpeo fox in the Nothofagus forest this morning and the many Darwin's rheas and Chilean flamingos along our way back to town this afternoon.

Our time in Chile has been blessed. There is no other word for it. Tomorrow I take my group to Brazil, and the following day to the Pantanal. Don't worry Dan: if we see anything rare or special, I'll be sure to send you a photo.

Our spectacular hotel in Torres del Paine

My wonderful colleague Cris showing
our group wildlife in Torres del Paine

Huemul track at the Grey Glacier

Calafate in flower in the
Patagonian spring

Unlikely

As unlikely as it seems that there should be an animal named the big hairy armadillo, here in Patagonia there is. It is a burrow-dwelling loner which spends its its dawns and dusks digging the dust with its big-toed front feet, raising its bristly behind to the sky as it searches for food. My group has been hoping to see one, but our time until now has been spent looking for (and finding) pumas. This afternoon, after a lovely walk with thorn-tailed rayaditos, austral blackbirds and a plain-mantled tit-spinetail (while we're on the subject of unlikely names), Cris and I proposed we should go on an armadillo hunt.

We went first to a trail to a waterfall, where Cris has often seen armadillos in the past. We got thirty metres from the bus, though grass heavily scuffed by these animals' toes, before we saw one, pottering about its business in the delicious light of evening. Our armadillo scratched at the ground and rooted with its snout, blundering at speed between bouts of digging, all the while unaware we were there. Finally this clockwork carapace trundled over a low ridge and we left it in grub-hunting peace.

We saw no puma this afternoon: the first time we have not done so on a drive in Torres del Paine. Instead we went in search of the unlikely big hairy armadillo. And this we emphatically saw.

Again

As we drove back this morning from a beautiful drive I was penning a post in my head. Sooner or later we had to go out and not see a puma. Our luck has been verging on absurd.

'Para, para, para!' in José's breathy, excited voice has become an anthem of our tour. It means, 'Stop, stop, stop!' It means puma. As we drove home, under a cerro at the roadside, close to the shore of Sarmiento Lake, he said it again today; and there, under a cliff, was a cat's face. Yet another cat's face. 'Son varios,' he said, 'There are several.' I have no idea how he knew this; no-one could see anything but a face, but he was sure. He was right: there were indeed three, as we found going up to the hill. Inside the park walking is not allowed off few established routes, but here we were outside the park, on land which we have permission to visit. The pumas, which we saw slinking away through the brush of the plateau behind us, were the last female we saw in the evening two days ago and the full-grown cubs to which we saw her calling. Two new cubs for us.

Getting back to the bus José asked me to tell the group, as I'd done even after our first sighting, that puma-watching is rarely this easy, this good, and that sometimes he goes two or three days without seeing a single one. 'We don't believe you,' they replied, each smiling. Reaching the our hotel, on an island in the blue eye of Pehoé Lake, José honoured me greatly: 'When are you coming back?' he asked.

Yesterday afternoon's female puma at the park gate,
a low resolution copy of a photo kindly given to me by Helen Pinchin

Yesterday evening's two pumas by the roadside
by Helen Pinchin

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    8
puma Puma concolor                                    14

12

There are times when the words aren't big enough to describe the facts, times when you're too amazed to hem in what you feel with the fences of grammar. This evening is one of those times. This afternoon we saw three pumas, all of them extremely well.

This is the more remarkable because this afternoon we took a break from puma-watching to walk the six kilometres of trail between two of the entrances to the park. Along our way there were herds of guanacos, gorgeous yellow-bridled finches, 6,000-year-old rock paintings and a South American snipe. It was a lovely way to blow away the cobwebs of three days spent largely in the bus (and with this afternoon's Patagonian wind, blow is a more than apt verb).

Reaching the guard station at the end of our walk, many needed the loo. By the time my poor clients emerged I was waving frantically to them and barking instructions. All about us guanacos were whinnying in alarm: a puma was near. José sprang to life and away up the hill to look for the cat. Nothing.

Then our radios crackle and, through the noise of the wind, we hear him urging us back to the road. We leap in the bus and drive to the spot, where José points into a ditch at the roadside. Sheltering here is a puma, a puma we later see moving in the open between patches of brush and crouching at length to the ground, almost out of sight. She is a well-known cat to José, another daughter of Mocha's mother (the last of the eight pumas we saw yesterday), from around the shore of Sarmiento Lake.

The light on this cat, from the dipping, horizontal sun, is divine. She shines. Shutters click and memories are recorded in binary codes. They are recorded deep in hearts too. Just thirty metres away, haloed in evening light, she is breathtaking, even in the context of the past two astonishing days of puma-watching.

We leave her to the hunt which José is sure is her plan and drive home. When we reach the lake where on our first evening we saw our first two pumas (which we thought at the time might be our only pumas), we see, sitting at the lake's edge, right by the side of the road, again no more than thirty metres from us, two pumas. They are the same two pumas, a large pale animal and a slight reddish animal.

How I wish I could write more, about the dead hog-nosed skunk we saw (and smelled) as they played with it, about the reddish cat leaping over the other, about their enchanted stare, turned on us as the sun set. I cannot write more as it is almost midnight and reception, where there is wifi, is about to close.

What I must report is that, seeing the cats so close this evening, and watching the behaviour of the smaller, reddish animal, José became sure that these were not a mating pair but a female (a female, he thinks, who disappeared two months ago from a neighbouring range) and her well-grown cub. The playful jumps, the mews, these, in his twenty-five years of experience, are hallmarks of cubhood.

This makes keeping an accurate list of the cats we have seen complex. Cris and I are sure that these cats are the same two we saw (much more distantly) at the site on our first evening. However this would make it highly likely that the large, apparently male animal we saw above the lake this morning, many hundreds of metres from us, was another new individual. José is adamant that a female with such a cub would not be seen without it. This morning's puma was not the adult we saw tonight (which the other day, at much greater distance, we took for the male of a pair). Who it was we do not know but, unless it was Camello whom we saw yesterday (wrong shape, wrong place, impossible), it was not a puma we have seen before. Thus we have had fourteen hits on twelve distinct pumas, all of them excellent sightings.

Words quite simply fail.

Naturetrekkers trekking for nature in Torres del Paine

Cave art in Torres del Paine

My charming, talented colleague Cris at work 

Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    8
puma Puma concolor                                    12

A waste of my time

We saw only one puma this morning. What a waste of my time.

It was the male from the pair we saw together on our first afternoon here. He was walking the crest of a striped sedimentary hill, the morning light aflame on his flank, and behind him last night's snow on the Paine range.

Often I think that my best snow leopards in Ladakh are not those which are relatively close; rather those which we see moving, being in the grandeur of their landscape. So it was today with this puma. Yesterday we saw several cats at very close quarters. We had our fill of their faces, their savage cold eyes and their swooping tails. Our puma today was hundreds of metres away but he was part of his tremendous landscape, walking at ease, freezing to stare at a guanaco, crouching to the dusty soil.

There were black-necked swans on the steely lakes this morning, and with them coscorobas. A Patagonian hog-nosed skunk pottered about his snuffly business by the road and long-tailed meadowlarks puffed their scarlet breasts in display. The sun shone and our faces shone with it, happy to be here in this icy toe of the world, dipped into a far southern sea.

The view from the dining room at our hotel yesterday

Camello yesterday afternoon, photographed by my friend Helen Pinchin who,
on account of very slow wifi, has been kind enough to send her gorgeous
images at very low resolution

Camello by Helen Pinchin

My own iPhone and Swarovski attempt at
photography with this morning's male

8

It is ten to eleven at night and I have not had a break since six this morning. This will have to be brief.

Already I can spot a significant flaw in my plan to be brief. For this afternoon we saw six new pumas, bringing the total of individual pumas seen today to eight, and between today and yesterday to ten. By any standard, that's just bonkers.

This afternoon's pumas were:

The Sarmiento female and her two cubs of two years. How José saw the face of the first cub peering out from dense scrub as we sped along the road is a mystery to us all. But he did, and here were two fat, sleek cubs, playing together. We took to a hill above them for a better view. They drifted away, slinking through the bushes and sometimes skipping over one another in lithe leaps. Unbeknown to us (though we were aware she must be nearby), their mother had stayed much closer to us, shielding her cubs. She slipped from almost under our feet and was seen by some as she crossed a hill to rejoin her young.

An old male called Camello, meaning camel. In an almost equally brilliant stroke José spotted a dead guanaco close to the road at the start of the afternoon. It was freshly killed and, to keep away condors, brush had been piled over the wound where the puma had begun to eat. We resolved to come back later when the culprit would most likely return to the scene of the crime. Our plans were immediately scuppered by an hour spent with one rear wheel spinning ineffectively in a hole, digging ever deeper into the soft ground. Sprung from our predicament by a helpful passing lorry, we visited Laguna Azul and pointed our optics at white-winged coots, silvery grebes, yellow-billed pintail and Chiloé wigeon. As the day grew old we went back to the kill and found a puma on it, right by the road. A vehicle too soon sent the animal into the scrubby hill, so we took a trail to find it. In perhaps the most thrilling encounter yet, in the glowing evening light this richly red old male (named Camello because his high shoulders and hips, and his low-slung back, give the impression of humps) walked right by us in the open.

Mocha's mother. As soon as we returned to our bus, leaving Camello in peace in a patch of scrub in which he had taken refuge, José, who had stayed on the hill, found a puma. We assumed it was Camello, again on the move now we had gone. But over the crackly radio we heard José's voice saying that the puma was behaving as though it were in heat. My superb colleague Cristofer is a vet and I have a passing acquaintance with mammal biology; we were surprised to hear that an old male puma should be in heat. It was another puma. We raced to the place, as fast as our group could shift and saw a lustrous female puma, also a rich red, moving up the hill opposite. On what José later told us was only the third occasion he has heard it in more than twenty years spent with pumas, the female then called to her hidden cubs. The sound, in the cold vastness of evening in this spectacular place, was stirring and strange. Later, having watched her weave over the hill, hiding the trail to her cubs, until dusk had almost fallen, we heard from José (who had looked closely at his photos) that this was the mother of the area's two most confident pumas: Mocha, whose name reflects the fact that half of her tail has been missing since birth, and Sarmiento, the very female whom, with her cubs, we had seen at the start of the afternoon.

So much for being brief. These are clumsy, blurted words and I'm too tired and out-of-time to make them better. Today has been an extraordinary day, on which we have seen eight individual pumas, including three generations of the same family, on which a thick-coated rusty female puma crossing an evening hillside was the 150th wild cat I have seen this year.

It is half-past-eleven and time for bed. Tomorrow by seven we will already be at the kill. Unless José's unparalleled eyes find other pumas on our way there. After today, nothing would surprise me.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    8
puma Puma concolor                                    10

José

José is a short, slight man with silvering hair and a neat moustache. He speaks with a Patagonian accent so thick that at times he is hard to understand. For twenty-five years he has watched the pumas of Torres del Paine, his swift brown eyes darting across the landscape, and for eighteen years he has been a park guard here. He knows the pumas of the park better than anyone. It might be no exaggeration to say that he knows pumas better than anyone else in the world.

Readers in the UK may well have seen the very recent BBC film which featured a mother puma and two cubs. Certainly most of my group arrived having seen it, having fallen for these gorgeous cubs. It was José who guided the BBC crew to the pumas, as he has led, guided and been filmed by innumerable crews over his many years in the park. It was one of his sons, also both expert trackers, who first saw these cubs, the offspring of the Laguna Larga female. Since then José and his family have seen them many times.

This morning speaks of the Patagonian spring. The sun is bright and, as there is no wind, the snow-covered mountains are divinely reflected in the meltwater lakes of this beauteous place. There are upland geese by the roadside and white-tufted grebes disturbing the zen-calm water with their dives.

We visit Laguna Amarga, the main park entrance and one of the best sites for seeing pumas. A Chilean flicker clings to the bottom of a window and taps its reflection; a Chilean swallow - arriving this far south for the coming spring - crouches on a park office roof; on the black beaches of the river below there are Chiloé wigeon; but we see no puma.

It is time to turn home for breakfast. It is only so long that even the most dedicated group can cope with the cold without caffeine and calories. As we reach Laguna Larga, the Cuernos del Paine reflected in painful perfection in its waters, José's body language, ever relaxed and affable, becomes in a moment focused and taut. 'Puma', he says and there on a slope is a stretched buffy form in the early sun. We raise binoculars; there are two; there are three, one clearly a well grown cub. They slip over the brow and we follow. Crossing the hillside there we see a mother and two cubs of more than a year, a large male and a slight female: the cubs José found for the BBC, with whom my clients had fallen in love just days before in the UK.

The pumas sit for a while and glow in the gilt morning light. They move and from above a guanaco whinnies in alarm again and again. Into the valley they go, one of the cubs - the male I think - breaking into chase as they disappear. A hare (European, introduced) bolts from the valley towards us. The cub had been playing at hunting.

With the pumas gone we head home. As yesterday, I translate José's experience of this landscape and its pumas to our clients. I ask whether he was ever truly afraid of the puma. 'Once,' he replies, 'when five of them had me surrounded.' I ask how he got out of that scrape. 'Shitting myself.' he says, and I translate.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    8
puma Puma concolor                                    5

7

Traditionally it has been said that there are seven big cats: lion, tiger, leopard, snow leopard, jaguar, cheetah and puma. Recently we have learned that the two species of clouded leopard are in fact big cats (indeed we have learned that there are two species of clouded leopard), sitting squarely in the subfamily Pantherinae, and it has been confirmed that the cheetah and puma are large small cats, belonging to the subfamily Felinae.

All the same, when I first, in a strange, difficult time last April, decided to go in search of all the big cats in a single year (an idea which had swum round my head for some time), I wanted particularly to see the traditional seven in a single year: lion, tiger, leopard, snow leopard, jaguar, cheetah and puma (though I was very keen in the process to see leopard and lion in both Africa and Asia).

I am tired this evening, after three long days on the road (so to speak: it would be truer to say I have been in flight for most of them). What's more I have to be up at six again tomorrow and it is already after eleven. Nonetheless, today these goals came true. For this afternoon my new group saw two pumas.

There was much, much more to see and hear and feel today, but I must sleep. Condors, Guanacos. Black-necked swans. Flying steamer ducks. Upland and ashy-headed geese. Darwin's rheas. The startlingly beautiful Torres del Paine.

And two pumas, a courting pair (just as my first jaguars this year) by their guanaco kill. With them my Big Cat Quest is complete. It's not of course: there are possibly more pumas and more jaguars to come, plus - I hope - the Iberian lynx. But these seven (and two subspecies of two of them) are seen.

This evening, driving back from the park to our hotel on the dazzlingly lovely Pehoé Lake, I felt ineffably privileged to have seen all that this year I have seen.

I am ineffably privileged.


Cats seen in 2015
cheetah Acinonyx jubatus fearonii                3
serval Leptailurus serval serval                    3
leopard Panthera pardus suahelicus            2
lion Panthera leo nubica                              78

snow leopard Panthera uncia                       3
jungle cat Felis chaus                                   2
tiger Panthera tigris tigris                            13

leopard Panthera pardus fusca                    4
lion Panthera leo persica                              7
leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis           15
flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps          1
wildcat hybrid Felis silvestris grampia/catus  1
jaguar Panthera onca                                    8
puma Puma concolor                                    2

People

2nd October

At 0430 I am awake and already the grey-necked wood-rails are singing their strange asynchronous duets from the forest. Then for a while their voices are lost in the rolling roar of the black howlers. Limpkins come next, their gravelly shrieks from every waterhole. A greyish saltator starts, always cheery, then noisy Chaco chachalacas. Soon it is day, with cattle tyrants jingling on the lawn and white-tipped doves double-hooting sonorously nearby.

It is time to get up.

At breakfast I see Layra. With her biologist-conservationist-entrepreneur partner Charlie Munn she's the owner of SouthWild, and we've spent much time talking in the past two days. Last night, while discussing cats, she asked whether I knew Amit in India. This is akin to asking whether I know Branco in Brazil or Brian in Britain. I know lots of Amits in India. The conversation quickly moved on and I thought nothing more of it.

This morning, as the saltators and the wood-rails sang me into the day, I realised which Amit she meant. Amit Sankhala is the grandson of Kailash Sankhala (director of Delhi Zoo, confidant of Indira Gandhi and founding director of Project Tiger). He is also the owner of Kanha Jungle Lodge, where I always stay in Kanha, cousin of Tarun and Dimple Bhati who run this lovely lodge, and the uncle of their charming son, my young friend, Jai who leads us on caterpillar-finding walks in the Indian jungle. Why of course I know Amit in India.

Amit is, it transpires, in Chile at the moment, with SouthWild's outfit in Patagonia. Watching pumas (as I hope to be myself next week). Here at SouthWild Pantanal today, Layra's guest as I am too, is Dania, daughter of the family which owns the property adjoining Torres del Paine where the tamest two pumas in the world are to be seen. The world of wildlife-watching and wildlife conservation, I am constantly reminded, is small. The owners of puma properties mix with the owners of jaguar properties and of tiger properties too.

Layra and I talk over breakfast, of projects in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru in which Charlie has been involved, in which I have been involved myself. I mention the photographer of a beautiful book on harpy eagles which lies nearby on the coffee table. Why of course Layra knows Pete Oxford. He and Charlie go back many years. For my part I met Pete and his South African wife Renée on an expedition to southwest Bolivia, to Reserva Natural de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa, led by the park's former director, my friend Omar Rocha. We were hoping to ring James' flamingos, though in fact we were unsuccessful until our return the following year. More recently I bumped into Renée in Ecuador, at El Monte Sustainable Lodge in Mindo, which is owned by our delightful mutual friends Mariela Tenorio and Tom Quesenberry.

I was at El Monte teaching an admittedly quixotic yoga course, on a deck visited by Central American agoutis, red-tailed squirrels and psychedelic flocks of tanagers. One of my students was a Huaorani man called Otobo. From a culture which still lives deep in the Ecuadorean Amazon, he is one of the most remarkable, thoughtful and charming human beings I have ever met. His silky dark hair comes to his waist and his chest is at least twice as deep as mine. Standing as tall as my shoulder he said to me once, 'Mi papá es bajo; yo soy medio alto. My dad is short; I'm kinda tall.' On another occasion, leaving a yoga class, he came up to me saying, 'Tu yoga muy bueno. Your yoga very good.'

All of these people, and many more, were with me this morning as I made the journey from SouthWild Pantanal to Cuiabá. I am bound for São Paulo, to meet a new group of clients, including five old friends from other tours, and go on with them to Santiago de Chile, Punta Arenas and Torres del Paine.

I left SouthWild Pantanal with a group of photographers, going home to the United States. We stopped in Poconé to break the journey and I was amused to see that next to the tourist shop at which we bought drinks, a shop which proudly displayed a sign reading, in Portuguese, 'This place, and everything in it is property of Lord Jesus,' was a motel. The word motel has a quite different meaning in South America. Here it is a paid-by-the-hour hotel, with screened parking bays for anonymity, to facilitate extramarital affairs and other proscribed encounters. Chuckling, I asked the local guide travelling with the group whether I was right in my assumption. He said yes, and, with no trace of irony, told me there were many such places in Cuiabá, some of them really very good.

I love wildlife. I live for wildlife. But I love people too. It is people who teach me the world over. It is people who warmly welcome me into their homes, who feed me, who share with me their favourite places, who make me laugh, sometimes with no common language, until I hurt from laughing. I've been grateful today on my journey for all of these people, who teach me, who make me laugh.

For one new person today I am especially grateful. Don F is Peruvian but works for now at SouthWild Pantanal. Thirty years ago he was a trapper, an illegal trader in jaguar skins. When I asked whether he had ever seen a black jaguar, he told me he had killed one once in a steel snare which broke its neck. To this day he recalls his indignation that, for this real rarity, the smugglers would give him only a fraction of the price of a spotted skin. For the past twenty-five years, however, Don F, and now his family, have worked with Charlie Munn in research (in which his wildlife insight is invaluable), conservation and tourism. Don F is a man who was once an enemy of wildlife, a killer of apex predators for profit. And now he works in conservation.

For the hours I have spent at SouthWild Pantanal this week, learning from this quiet, quick-witted, kind man, I am grateful.