I spent the past few weeks in the Pantanal, the vast, seasonally-flooded basin in southwestern Brazil.  It is an extraordinary place, where enormous cattle ranches provide a refuge for some of the finest gatherings of wildlife in the hemisphere: a successful, sustainable conservation success story.

Many photographers have been flocking to the Pantanal for the last couple years since the discovery of a predictable location for seeing and photographing wild jaguars. So many have started going, in fact, that what was a paucity of wild jaguar photos just a few years ago has turned into a glut. Jaguar tourism is booming, and if this results in more habitat protection, I'm all for it.  But I didn't go after big cats on this trip, I went after Giants.

In the Pleistocene, the plains of South America were dominated by Xenarthran mammals, including giant ground sloths and enormous armadillo-like creatures such as Glyptodonts. Those gigantic forms are extinct now, but there are still some of their remarkable descendants, such as this Giant Armadillo.

The Giant Armadillo is one of the least-studied and most rarely seen of South American mammals, being strictly nocturnal and spending as much as 2/3 of its life in underground burrows. To capture this emerging animal, the first I had ever seen, I set a camera trap at the entrance to an occupied burrow and waited for him to come out.  This was the first shot I got in a week of camera-trapping, and it is still my favorite - an intimate view of a rare and fascinating animal, showing no fear or anxiety, heading out for a night of foraging.

I have begun working on a long-term photo-project with these animals, in conjunction with Dr. Arnaud Desbiez and the Pantanal Giant Armadillo Project.

 

Nikon D300, 18-200mm lens, Camera Trap

 

 

Life, Color, Drama, Reality .... No Digital Manipulation