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Location Pantanal, Brazil<\/p>\n
Disaster Wildfires, a number of years<\/p>\n
Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and doing research in Brazil\u2019s Pantanal, a region that includes the world\u2019s largest tropical wetland and where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. Fires<\/a> in the Pantanal have reached new extremes, killing at least 17 million vertebrate animals and burning 27% of the vegetation cover in 2020. Climate breakdown made the Pantanal drier<\/a> between 2001-21, increasing<\/a> the occurrence of above-average fires in the region.<\/p>\n I\u2019m usually down in the Pantanal during the dry season \u2013 jaguar season \u2013 when everything\u2019s just holding on, waiting for the first rains. From December to April, the Pantanal, the world\u2019s largest wetland, is flooded. The water is crystal clear, it\u2019s green, lush and beautiful. Then in June, the drought starts. Everything\u2019s brown. There\u2019s a mark left on all the trees of where the water level was. Everyone is congregated next to the major water sources, including jaguars.<\/p>\n Abbie Martin, founder of the Jaguar ID Project, searching for jaguars in the Northern Pantanal in Brazil\u2019s Mato Grosso. Photograph: Kate Ochsman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n I\u2019ve seen jaguars flipping around capybaras, jumping from trees for caimans. The encounters that always stuck out to me are the mum and cub because the mother is a cold-blooded killer. Then, when she\u2019s next to her baby, she turns into this loving \u201cwill do anything for her cub\u201d type.<\/p>\n In June 2020, the middle of the Covid lockdown, when I was living on this boat in the middle of the Caribbean, the worst mega-fire hit. I couldn\u2019t go there. I couldn\u2019t help. My friend Duda told me everything was burning. Her husband\u2019s dad owns the jaguar ecological reserve. She was sending me videos of wildlife running from the fires. There was a Nasa map and you could see this massive fire 25 miles (40km) long. My boyfriend brought me to hospital because I was having a panic attack. I thought I was having a heart attack.<\/p>\n My friend and I decided to raise money with GoFundMe. We send $90,000 (\u00a369,000) to a team of 15 or 20 volunteers who needed masks and proper fire-resistant clothing to protect the community village and research base.<\/p>\n Martin and her boat driver, Sigano, collecting jaguar data. Photograph: Kate Ochsman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The fire burned for four months straight. It would stay down in the roots, and even though it looked like it was out, just a little wind and it would pop back up. The fire jumped the river, burned past the firebreak, and then jumped back over. They compared it to the devil, able to walk across the water, burn the forest and then come back behind them when they weren\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n In October, they opened up the border. When I landed in [the Brazilian city] Cuiab\u00e1, the air was so hot it felt unbearable to breathe. The smoke was there. We drove through ash windstorms. You can\u2019t see anything. Everything was gone.<\/p>\n All those trees that were so beautiful, burned. It looked like a bomb had dropped.<\/p>\n There was a lot of injured wildfire. When a fire is really big, all the animals find this small spot where it\u2019s not burning. Then it burns and they all die together. You have a cemetery \u2013 howler monkeys, capuchins, coatis, birds and iguanas. Everyone in the area, dead together.<\/p>\n It was a huge relief when we saw all the cats. We were checking off the boxes like: \u201cOh my God, Patricia, she\u2019s alive, and Medrosa.\u201d They were all there. They\u2019d survived. There was still life, there were still animals. The first rains came, and within days you started to see green. If you didn\u2019t know what you were looking at, you couldn\u2019t even tell it had burned.<\/p>\n The next year, I was at the reserve with Duda. The fires started. You\u2019d wake up in the morning, and the first thing you would smell was smoke in the room. You could taste it. You opened the door, you couldn\u2019t see more than 10 metres (30ft). How was this happening again?<\/p>\n The fire was burning really close to the jaguar lodge. The people who were fighting the fires were the people who took care of the garden and brought in the cows. They weren\u2019t firefighters. We were like: \u201cWhat? We\u2019re going to sit back and not do anything when this is a moment to act?\u201d<\/p>\n We went with this farmhand to an area where bulldozers were working on making this firebreak. You cut down a big opening of forest and when the fire comes to that edge, you\u2019re ready to fight it. When the fire starts to jump, you put it out. You keep putting it out until it dies. It was like war. Duda and I were riding on the top of this water tank being pulled by a tractor. It was me, Duda, one of my volunteers, and this little 12-year-old son of the guy driving the tractor.<\/p>\n Checking one of her trail cameras in the Northern Pantanal. Photograph: Kate Ochsman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The truck got stuck in the mud. The water was too heavy. We didn\u2019t have radios. No one was working. No one was out there. We were just stuck. There was a huge fire near us. We could see the ash falling. We knew it was coming. We could feel it. The farm owner showed up in his truck. We drove towards where the guys were working the firebreak. We hopped out of the truck with these big rubber mats you use to hit fire.<\/p>\n It was getting hotter. The fire was picking up. The bulldozers needed to stop because they couldn\u2019t work fast enough to make this make sense any more. We could see the fire creeping up. Looking over, this little boy was hitting this fire. He shouldn\u2019t have been here. It wasn\u2019t right. We were like: \u201cLet\u2019s get out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n We were in the back of the farm owner\u2019s truck. The fire was coming over the top. It was right on the tyres of the bulldozers now. There\u2019s fire all around us. This was it. We\u2019re going to explode. We\u2019re going to die. The guy drove through the fire. We got ourselves out of there.<\/p>\n About the series <\/p>\n