Leanne in Argentina: Pantanal... first day

my hotel in Cuiaba

A duck. No, just kidding, but there are plenty of ducks coming.

This was a pay phone booth, shaped like the favorite bird of the region, a Jaboru (totally spelled that wrong)

and here´s the real thing! better pics to come

tropical dry forest looks like this

flooded bits/mud puddles

See the termite mounds over there? They are different colors in different areas, depending on the composition of the soil. Also, all of these in a field would be for one big colony.

Here´s a termite nest... IN A TREE.

Something called Monk´s Stair, a neat vine

a (dead) lizard

The transpantaneira was going to be a cattle route that went from Mato Grosso to the state above it, and it never got finished.

There is an ovum bird´s nest on that sign

There are 126 wooden bridges like this one on the road. Some of them are old.

totally forgot most of the names of the birds that Edilson told me, but this is some type of ibis

CAIMANS! lounging in the mud

The first capybara!

Just taking a swim by the caiman, no big deal. The Caiman are not like american alligators that go after big prey, just fish and occasionally wounded birds

wild emus

keeping out of the hot sun

this plant has very stinky leaves

idk why I took this picture

a vulture, flying

freaking monk parakeets!!!

vines growing on the ground

This is a tiger heron.

look at all them boids!

surprisingly they all get along fairly well

a Savannah hawk, I believe

its butt

the dead capybara that was attracting vultures

san francisco, the ... patron saint of the pantanal? okay, whatever you want.

A duck.

This type of tree apparently has seeds that birds love, and so bird watchers love these trees. There were a bunch of them planted at the lodge

A small one of those trees, and to the right a mango tree sapling

mangoes!

I think this was the picture of me trying to get a pciture of the howler monkeys.

Marsh deer. there were a bunch of these.

a very cute cow. The lodge is also a farm, so there are herds of cattle and horses just wandering around the place.

normal domestic pigs, in a puddle. I also saw a peccary, wich is the wild pig, but it was too fast for a picture

I believe that this is the fruit that has seeds that the natives used to make black paint

lots of palm trees

BIG leaves

Ant-lion trap! Unfortunately we didn´t see any, but what would happen is that an insect would go in, then as they´re leaving the sand would be shifting and the ant lion would eat it.

some kind of animal hole

a fig tree and a palm tree

TURTLE

bye turtle

MARMOSET!

aw look at that face!

more landscape

a shell. So what happened is that the entire area used to be an ocean way back in the day, and so there are still some aquatic snails (shell above) and freaking freshwater crabs! we didn´t see any, but the crabs dig holes and hibernate during the dry season, then in the wet season they come out! Also, apparently there´s a type of hawk that specializes only in eating snails.

This is cool, the fig tree is planted when birds that ate their fruit poop on a palm tree, and it germinates. Eventually, it gets so big that it overwhelms and eventually kills the palm tree.

giant mosquito. No, just kidding, it´s some kind of wasp. Oh, what a relief, right?

a bit blurry, but these are giant black ants climbing up and down the hanging vines

a neat red ant I saw

This is some sort of tree parasite on the leaf

some of the moss and stuff here made it look like the trees had been burned

These are africanized honey bees

This is really neat: a fig tree that obviously outgrew its palm tree host, killed it, and it decomposed, but the fig tree grew around the trunk, so now it has one of these.

Cappuccine monkeys!

There were about 3 of them, and they were very curious

my favorite pic of them

although in this one you can see the face a bit

The three of them sat in this palm tree and ate some of the fruit.

I thought those leaves were birds or something going after termites. I was wrong

a cool sapling, the pods of these fruits were everywhere in the forest

setting sun

This is cool, it was called the polish tree or sandpaper tree, the leaves feel like rough sandpaper, and apparently are used to buff stuff out and all that. Also, the very cool bending folding pattern.