Standing out in the night sky over the top of me here in Paraguay, I can see the Southern Cross. Last night we went out ... it was really fun. A lot of people might have a problem with night hunting, but it's perfectly legal here, and we're looking for animals that are totally nocturnal, like the crab-eating raccoon  ... 

Last night we got a huge crab-eating raccoon, much larger than a North American raccoon; we saw a lot of cool night animals. It was fantastic; only problem was we got in at about three in the morning had to get up at about 5 to get out to the place where I thought I had the buffalo patterned. Got in position, nothing came by, so apparently as smart as I thought I was, I'm not ... you can't pattern these buffalo. Then we did some scouting, got the truck buried up the cab in the swamp, finally got a tractor to come and pull us out. Then Matt and I went on a hike ... right at dark we bumped into a huge big herd of wild boars, along the edge of a swamp. We could hear them 20 yards away, but so thick, just little glimpses, couldn't get a shot and finally had to give up on them as night fell. Coolest thing to hear them within 10 yards of them crunching the palms, just couldn't see them. 

The Next Day ...

Last night we went out just about the whole night; it was a beautiful evening ... new moon pitch black, perfect night to look for the night animals. We saw a total of eight crab-eating foxes, but otherwise, considering it was pretty slow. Then this morning we actually got in about 4 in the morning and 5 had to get up. Rocky McBride flew over with his airplane; he's on a ranch not too far away, where a lot of his jaguar study is going on. It's the most important study for jaguar conservation in the world. And Rocky has been doing it for 25 years. It's absolutely incredible. We're a part of it and very honored to be a part of it.

We went looking for jaguar tracks. We flew over to his other ranch, landed, jungles all the way, but you can also see the habitat loss, and that's what Rocky's trying to stop. If the jaguars have value to these ranchers then they'll keep the brush country that the jaguars need to survive. If they don't, they hire jaguar killers at 100 dollars per jaguar. Rocky has collared three jaguars that have been killed by neighboring ranchers for depredation reasons. 

Right away we went out and found monster jaguars tracks, as big as Rocky's ever seen. We have six dogs, his dog team that he's had for two years, really a great group of dogs. They got on the track and managed to get on the jaguar and then things went really badly. The jaguar turned and killed four of the dogs befoe we could get to it. These are magnificent dogs, just a horrible thing. Rocky says one in ten jaguars will turn and fight; they're just such monstrous huge animals they kill the dogs just one single bite to the back of the neck and head. It's a sad, sad part of what we do to try to preserve and conserve these animals. Everyone had tears in their eyes, it was terrible. We're going to go after him again tomorrow, to see if we can get him darted and collared. If we would have got up there sooner, the cat might have done the same thing to us, very sad day for us here in Paraguay.