Embiara Lodge had thumbs up from the local Giant Otter community

It all started in January this year when we received the visit of a Giant otter scout party who seemed to be checking out our stretch of the Rio Negro to determine if it was a suitable neighbourhood tohouse the family, bring up the pups, safety aspects and more importantly the food supply well as the months progressed we concluded that we received the finned thumbs up. We have never seen so many Giant Otter families as this year. Just on our stretch of river we located 3 burrows where fmilies hat settled. One morning in May coming down the river in a Kayak we counted 22 giant otters quite an experience. here are some pictures of these encounters. The first picture shows the advance scout party in our oximore in front of our port

and next is one of the burrows with loads of activities

Family affairs at Embiara

Here is a large Rheas family enjoying the empty meadows of Embiara lodge. This meadow is kept unocupied in the rainy seson so that if our floading fields "Vazante do Castelo and Vazante do Periquito" fload which usuallys starts hapening from March onwards we have a place to move the cattle to. This year that has not occured so the field remained unoccupied and the Rheas had the area all for themselves. In one of our many lakes a happy Capybara family or is it a creche for young capybaras are enjoying a swim.

Very little rain fall recorded this year in the Rio Negro region of the Pantanal

In early February this year I took some pictures in the same location as I did a year ago when we had a reasonable amount of rain and the road to Aquidauana closed when the river overflowed its banks. The first picture shows the view from the Barra Mansa bridge looking at the other side of the river where we have the notorious "Boca Quente" or hot mouth in english which is where the main road into town goes through and our road access to Aquidauana closes when the river overflows. This year it never closed becaus the rains never came!

Our port located on the oximore of the Rio Negro is also visibly different and reflects how much lower the river was in February 2009

An other landmark is the "snow white beach located on our river stretch almost oposite to the entrance of our oximore visibly larger this year in february when compared to last year same day.