Biology Reference
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wolves. Their initial success made them believe that this novel technique could work well in
the hot Cerrado.
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 be-
come 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 popula-
tions and natural processes, such as fire, to fluctuate naturally, with little or no human inter-
vention. 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.
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