We stopped for a break so Carly could give Mason a drink of water. The bells on his collar jingled as he lapped up the water from his bowl. The bells were a holdover from his grizzly work, a safety precaution designed to warn grizzlies that the team and Mason were near. Here in the Cerrado, Mason had wakened sleeping giant anteaters, and the nearsighted creatures merely ignored him and moved on as Mason retreated. He had also roused tapirs dozing in the grasslands, and Mason gave them a wide berth. Once he came face-to-face with a coiled rattlesnake, but Carly gently called him back to her side and the curious dog left the snake alone.
Here, the main reason for the bells was to warn off herds of peccaries. Only two months earlier, Mason had had a potentially fatal encounter. He was plowing through the grass and ran into a large gang of fierce peccaries. One turned and attacked, slashing Mason across his rump. Fortunately, Carly was close by and rushed Mason to the vet. After a few weeks of rest, Mason was ready to return to action, more wary of peccaries than ever before.
When we returned to camp, Carly took out Mason’s bowl and fed him his ration. Rather than put him back in his holding crate for his afternoon siesta, she left him on the porch, tethered to a post by a long chain. Out of the nearby forest came a female black-and-white curassow. This heavy-bodied, sharp-clawed ground dweller was a favorite of local hunters but not a bird to mess with. She made her way over to where Mason was resting, but rather than claw at him as a possible predator, she snuggled close. According to Carly, this had become a daily routine. The male black-and-white curassow is all black, like Mason, and she may have seen him as a larger version of a possible mate. A female curassow in love, but one with a mean streak. This same female had run down one of Leandro’s roosters and killed it.
The next morning we left Mason and his curassow flame snuggling on the porch while we toured Emas by car. We drove a long way to the northern border of the park but saw no anteaters or rheas. Their absence surprised me because we came upon huge numbers of termite mounds sticking up in odd funnel-like shapes. The mystery of the missing anteaters had a gruesome explanation. A catastrophic grassland fire had swept across Emas in 2005. The long fur of the anteaters had turned them into panicked torches, and five years later the population had yet to recover, in part because of their slow breeding pattern.
A central tenet of park design is to create reserves large enough to allow wildlife populations and natural processes, such as fire, to fluctuate naturally, with little or no human intervention. In this case, Emas would need to be several times larger than the area burned by the worst grassland fire of the century. An alternative design scenario would require that Emas be well connected by habitat corridors to other anteater reserves, to maintain a resupply route if a population inside a reserve is decimated by fire, poaching, or disease.
Somewhat discouraged by the lack of wildlife, we headed for lunch at a canteen attached to a run-down pool hall on the park’s outskirts. Over a meal of rice, platanos, and beefsteak, I mentioned that my Serra da Canastra birding trip, with its added sightings of maned wolves and giant anteaters, had sparked the collective curiosity of the van passengers. Together with Wes Sechrest, then head of the Global Mammal Assessment project of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, John Morrison, David Wilcove, and I wondered: How many places on Earth still support the same roster of large mammals that were present there 500 years ago? Is Emas one of them? The question has an important relationship to rarity because 39 percent of large mammals with body mass greater than 20 kilograms (a maned wolf weighs in at around 23 kilograms) are considered threatened with extinction, as compared with 25 percent of mammals overall. Theory and lots of empirical data tell us that bigger mammals tend to be more wide-ranging than smaller mammals, and as George Powell had shown in Peru, most parks are too small to support them. With hunting of large mammals common almost everywhere today, the answer to our question, we speculated, could well be zero or at best very few places left on Earth with intact large-mammal faunas.
See what we're tweeting about
2 Comments
Add CommentShort answer: no, they can't co-exist when their entire ecosystem is being co-opted for rapidly changing monoculture cultivation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne way we might co-exist with the natural world, not just a few endangered species:
http://5050by2150.wordpress.com
Man's presence may very well be the precursor to the next mass extinction. We have been very busy setting the stage
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfor the big event. As if born to dig up the the remains
of previous existence to repeat the cycle. It may require
a large space rock to save the planet from us. Nature rebooting.