The Kingdom of Rarities (24 page)

Map of Brazil and environs

“Look for an overripe, black banana moving through the grass.” Edson Endrigo, our nature guide extraordinaire, was explaining his technique for spotting giant anteaters in Serra da Canastra National Park, just one of the rarities in this area. Obediently looking up on the hillside, I spotted a two-meter-long mobile banana. We jumped out of the van and circled behind a female anteater with
a baby clinging to her back. My two companions, David Wilcove and John Morrison, and I closely tracked her progress.

If the greater one-horned rhino seems odd and prehistoric, the giant anteater offers good company as one of the most peculiarlooking mammals on the planet. Both are ranked as threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The
tamanduá-bandeira
, or
papa-formigas
, as it is known in Brazil, cuts a comical figure, sporting an elongate, arching snout and bowlegged limbs, all ending in an immense shaggy tail. The rest of the body is shaggy, too, featuring a striking long pelage of dark bands on light. The female in front of us moved along like an animated throw rug.

An anteater walks on thickened pads on the outsides of its paws, as its digits are turned under its feet. An observer might think of this awkward creature, with its poor eyesight, bad hearing, and odd gait, as defenseless against secretive jaguars and pumas. That would be a miscalculation. With its acute sense of smell, the anteater can make up for its nearsightedness. If cornered, it will stand up on its hind legs and slash with its massive claws any human or feline predator foolish enough to tangle with it.

The mama anteater stopped and flicked her tongue in the dirt. Unlike the vast majority of mammals, the giant anteater lacks teeth. It has no real need for them because it inserts its long, narrow tongue into crevices, removes ants and termites with its sticky saliva, and swallows them whole. Crouching downwind, I inhaled deeply to catch its scent and wondered if consuming 30,000 ants a day gives this creature, or its flatulence, the odor of formic acid. I smelled nothing unusual.

Edson shooed us back into the van to pursue the other goal of this outing: to search for the Cerrado's rare endemic birds. Earlier that morning, he had led us to the Brazilian merganser, an incredibly rare duck that, like the Kirtland's warbler and the greater onehorned rhinoceros, is an extreme habitat specialist, one that lives only on the fast-moving, clear streams of the upland Cerrado. Contamination from gold mining (now banned) caused the decline of
this species. Edson guided us down a canyon to give us a fabulous view of a bird whose entire global population was probably no more than 250 individuals. Mergansers are elegant-looking ducks, but the Brazilian version has a startling profile, accented by its pointy head feathers. This solitary female had chicks perched on her back as she guarded them through their first week of life.

Giant anteater (
Myrmecophaga tridactyla
)

As we moved on, nothing could have prepared us for the next sighting. In a grassland to our left, Edson's sharp eyes spotted a hovering bird. It was the most dashing of raptors, an aplomado falcon. The aerial predator was preoccupied, following something gliding
through the tall grass. Then a head with pointed ears emerged. The maned wolf looked around for a second and moved on. The falcon persisted, perhaps planning to feast on the large insects or birds scared up during the terrestrial predator's afternoon hunt.

Shadows fell over the rugged escarpment in the distance as the afternoon wore on. We drove out of the park and entered the agricultural zone—“the Ag,” for short. An hour later, our magical sightings of the wolf and the falcon, the merganser and giant anteater, began to feel like a dream. This had been only a first taste of the Cerrado's wildlife. To learn more about how these animals navigated the last natural pockets embedded in a landscape of soy and cattle would require a longer stay, and for that I had decided to join an unlikely pair of long-term researchers.

March 2008. The sea of grasses undulated in the warm, dry breezes. A tall, blond woman dressed in khakis and field vest reached down to release her dog from its leash. “Okay, Mason, let's go to work!” The dog dashed into the tall grass of Emas National Park. Every so often a grassy wave broke over the upright tail of the black Labrador retriever as he bounded through a large marshy area bordering a palm glade. The tail zigged and zagged through the wet pampa. Carly Vynne, then a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle, kept her eye on the dog. Within minutes, Mason returned with a look of great urgency. “What is it, Mason? Let's go look.” Having grabbed her attention, Mason led us back through the muck and stood with his nose pointed toward the base of a grass clump.

At first we couldn't see anything. Then we bent down and noticed a cylindrical dropping half submerged below the tussock. Bingo. In a vast expanse of grassland filled with thousands of smells, Mason had detected the scent of rarity: he had sniffed out the droppings of a giant anteater. Carly could barely contain her excitement. Gathering herself, she placed a sample of anteater dung in a vial of preservative to protect the scat sample and the precious strands of DNA it contained from further degradation. Those convinced
that dogs are superior to humans praise their loyalty, good nature, and capacity for unconditional love. Scientists appreciate another canine advantage—dogs have an uncanny sense of smell, surpassed only by that of bears and, by coincidence, the giant anteater. The homely bloodhound, with the keenest nose of any dog, possesses a sense of smell 300 times more acute than that of its handlers. Bloodhounds can detect a scent nearly two weeks old, but they are a lot harder to train than Labradors.

Sniffer dogs have recently been recruited for biological field studies because they excel at locating the fecal tidings of rare mammals. Carly had invited me to join the last year of her fieldwork in her study of a group of rare South American mammals in the Cerrado. The maned wolf, jaguar, puma, giant anteater, and giant armadillo of the continent's pampas and central savannas are vestiges of a rich Serengeti-like fauna that flourished in the Pleistocene epoch, 15,000 years ago. Today, their secretive behavior, low population densities, and ability to hide in the waist-high grass make sightings of these charismatic vertebrates quite rare. Their presence in the agricultural landscape remained an open question. The small size of the existing Cerrado parks and the wide-ranging nature of these species probably meant that some of them lurked out there in the ranchlands as well.

Field biologists who study the habitat use of rare mammals look for any sign: a scrape, a footprint, or the unexpectedly precious gift, a dropping. Miraculous advances in molecular biology have enabled researchers to extract strands of DNA and hormones from animal droppings, transforming the lowly fecal deposit into a gold mine of information. A scat sample can reveal the species of the depositor, individual identity, sex, reproductive status, diet, and health. Moreover, accumulated droppings from any single species, giant anteater or jaguar, yield the most prized data of all for rarities—density, home range, and population size.

The challenge, of course, is to find the fresh material from secretive animals that are often solitary and only part-time above-grounders,
as is the giant armadillo. The first three years of Carly's study, and other studies like it, had begun to show such promise that by 2010 human-dog research teams had gone global. Scent dogs are now used to study grizzly bears, Mexican wolves, wolverines, fishers, Javan rhinos, Indochinese tigers, Amur tigers, and other secretive mammals. The roots of this booming human-canid collaboration, however, trace back to an animal shelter outside Seattle, Washington.

If popular belief grants cats nine lives, dogs most certainly deserve at least two or three. Heath Smith told me that he had no opinion on animal karma when he entered the local shelter in Enumclaw, Washington, on a gray day in March 2004. He was not on a mercy expedition. Once inside the pound, Smith began bouncing a tennis ball off the concrete floor. Some dogs wagged their tails and rose to lick the visitor's hand but ignored the ball. A long-legged black Labrador pressed against the edge of his cage. He ignored the stranger but fixated on the delightful object Smith tossed in the air. The dog trembled with excitement and panted heavily. Here on display was precisely the kind of overwrought behavior bound to discourage even bighearted adopters. The shelter employee offered some details. “He was picked up running along the highway; must have gotten lost while hunting. You sure that's the one you want?” Heath nodded after taking a minute to confer with his boss by cell phone. “Great,” answered the relieved keeper, “because he had twenty-four hours left.”

Outside the pound, Heath escorted Mason into the cab of his pickup for the drive home. He turned onto I-90 and made for the house of his employer-landlord, Sam Wasser, a renowned conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Heath was an accomplished dog handler, and Mason was one of the first candidates to become a new breed of working canine. The dog seemed delighted to be out of the kennel and most interested in the
tennis ball hidden in the pocket of the person he was now accompanying. So began an improbable journey, from incarcerated stray on death row to professional scent dog set loose in the Brazilian outback.

Carly was one of Sam's students. She decided to try out scent dogs in her pilot study site, Emas National Park, in south-central Brazil, home to all of the Cerrado's largest vertebrates. “Ema” is the Brazilian name for the greater rhea, an ostrich relative that is common there. So are many other species that could be dangerous to a domestic animal bounding across the wild Cerrado. Having been trained to heel was vital if a dog were to stumble upon whitelipped peccaries, for example, which could tear a dog to shreds. The Cerrado is also home to fifty-three species of snakes. Carly wore snake guards to protect herself from the poisonous ones. Vipers, rattlesnakes, and fer-de-lances are all capable of killing a canine in one deadly strike. She was worried about unexpected encounters with anacondas, too. So she carried a machete in case there was a confrontation.

Protected areas are the best places to sniff out giant anteaters and giant armadillos in the Cerrado. Most grassland and dry forest mammals of South America are essentially rain forest species that have adapted to residing in seasonal forests and savannas. Thus, their extinction in the Cerrado may not spell the end of the species because others of their kind may still lurk in numbers in the forest. The maned wolf is an exception. Biologists call it an “obligate” grassland species because it cannot survive in the forest, having adapted, like the lion, to hunt its prey in open country.

Parks such as Emas, which is 1,320 square kilometers in size, are established to protect rare species, and they often perform well for habitat specialists and global rarities that live at high densities in small areas. The wandering kind of rarities, such as the maned wolf and giant anteater, that live at low densities can be much harder to protect. Outside of the deep Amazon, their world is changing by the minute. Circumstantial evidence shows that many rare tropical carnivores disappear when they leave the safe confines of their reserves.