the times Saturday April 9 2022
Travel 41
Tompkinses, Carlisle is a member of
conservation royalty. Now officially
retired, he is nevertheless leading an
exciting new journey through Chile and
Argentina — part of a portfolio of Impact
tours launched by &Beyond that promise
to take guests behind the scenes of
pioneering projects expanding our plan-
et’s wild spaces.
Although by his own admission South
America is 30 years behind Africa in
terms of conservation and ecotourism,
Carlisle believes that the potential is
enormous. Pumas and jaguars deservedly
steal most of the limelight.
Nine species — including giant
anteaters and red macaws — have
been reintroduced to Ibera National
Park and adjoining land donated
by the Tompkins Foundation; this
is now managed by Rewilding Ar-
gentina, the foundation’s affiliate
NGO. But here, the jaguar is the
villain turned superstar.
In January last year the first
female and cubs were released on
the island of San Alonso, a short
flight from Rincon del Socorro but,
crucially, far enough from other
human communities. A year later the
first male, Jatobazinho, was released, pav-
ing the way for breeding in the wild.
“January 6 last year was the best day of
my life,” Tompkins says when I meet her
on San Alonso, where a farmhouse has
been transformed into a research centre.
“I never imagined it could happen. But
when that jaguar walked out the gate I
thought, ‘I could die tomorrow.’ Now
everything else is icing on the cake.”
Locked down in California during
Covid, the 71-year-old has returned to
Ibera for the first time in two years. A day
earlier she was declared an honorary
citizen of Corrientes province by the
mayor in a surprise ceremony — testi-In search of South America’s big cats
Sarah Marshall
takes a thrilling tour,
looking for jaguars
and pumas in
Argentina and Chile
W
hen shifting
clouds provide the
only snatches of
shade in a sun-
scorched land, it
takes until night-
fall for most life
to wake up. After a day dozing in the
shadows, marsh deer rustle through reeds,
rheas dust off their tail feathers and tiger
herons ripple through lagoons bleeding
sunset red.
Twenty-five years ago, this vast, water-
logged section of northern Argentina
was denuded of wildlife. But, slowly, bird-
song has grown louder and paw prints
increasingly pattern trails.
The most distinctive of all belongs to
the jaguar, a native big cat only recently
returned to Corrientes province after 70
years’ absence.
“My grandparents were very scared of
jaguars,” says Mingo, a local gaucho lead-
ing me on a horseback ride through
rewilded swamps. But in less than two
generations, attitudes have softened. “My
11-year-old daughter is crazy about
nature,” he says, laughing. “She talks about
animals all the time.”
None of this has happened by accident.
The Ibera Wetlands — a pancake-flat,
largely inaccessible area riddled with
waterways and drifting islands — has
become the focus of an ambitious conser-
vation project launched by the American
conservationists Kris Tompkins and her
late husband, Doug.
Formerly chief executives of the adven-
ture clothing companies Patagonia and
The North Face respectively, the couple
spent several decades working to protect
more than 14 million acres of land in
Argentina and Chile. Their vision was to
restore wild spaces, which would event-
ually be managed by the state and
sustained in part by ecotourism.
Purchased in the late 1990s, Rincon del
Socorro is a renovated cattle farm, and a
gateway to Ibera for visitors. Reached by
a seven-hour drive or 90-minute flight on
a light aircraft from Posadas, the gateway
city linking flights from Buenos Aires to
the far north, the resort has six rooms and
three bungalows that open onto lawns
teeming with wildlife. Capybara, the
largest rodents, are daily visitors; at night
the silhouettes of snooping foxes and
snuffling armadillos are illuminated by
campfire flames.
“The last time I came here I spent five
hours looking for white-collared peccary,”
Les Carlisle, my guide, says of the stumpy,
boar-like creatures now regularly seen
trooping through the gardens.
The South African conservationist, who
has been employed by &Beyond for 30
years, is a pioneer of game-management
techniques. His achievements range from
transporting 30 white rhinos to Rwanda in
a jumbo jet to repopulating the parks of his
home country with cheetah cubs. Like themony to the impact her work has had on
the community.
As we walk around the high-security
enclosures where a new generation of
jaguars were conceived, she admits that
she was terrified of the predators in the
beginning and would travel across the
island in a golf cart fitted with a cage.
“That’s the arc of going from not knowing
to knowing,” she says with a smile.
She shows me an enclosure for giant
otters, where they rip into fat, shiny fish
with the ease of tearing through tissue
paper. Then we set out on horseback to
search for a collared jaguar; riding through
grass so long it reaches the base of our
saddles as a researcher holds aloft a
telemetry device.
Dodging wriggling snakes and
potholes dug by armadillos, we
canter through a bleached, lemo-
ny haze of morning sun. But de-
spite our efforts all we uncover is
the carcass of a capybara swarm-
ing with flies. Still, it’s evidence
that jaguars are nearby.
Carlisle, who has known Tomp-
kins for several years, recalls the
moment she almost ended her in-
volvement in the project after the death
of her husband in a 2015 kayak accident.
She shares her story with us over lunch at
a table set beneath acacia trees at San
Alonso’s main house.
Comparing Doug’s death to “an ampu-
tation”, she says that there were times
when she wanted to disappear. “Grief
became my third language; sometimes it
was deep and dark blue, like swimming
through an ink well,” she says.
Eventually reaching the conclusion that
she should continue doing the things they
loved doing together, she chose to “turn upygiant
ave
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She shares
atableseGETTY IMAGES; RINCON DEL SOCORROTorres del Paine National Park in Chile’s Patagonia regionA young cougar in ChileA room at Rincon del SocorroMore trips next page