Recently, we had two wonderful encounters (two afternoons in a row!) with a big, male jaguar. With the first encounter, we were drifting quietly down river by boat using our electric engine. It was 5.30pm, and as we came around the first bend in the river, there he was on the river bank. Truth be told, I only got to see his rear end as he drifted into the bushes, but the other person on the boat did manage to see all of him. I remember being amazed by how well his markings allowed him to drift into the mottled shadows.
The next day, we returned to the river at the same time, and I was disappointed to see that he wasn't in the same place as the day before (even if the chances of that happening are very small). But then, a few hundred metres down the river, there he was again. He initially stood up to check us out...
but after deciding that we weren't really that interesting, he sat down to have a rest. We spent about 10 minutes drifting past him, before eventually he got up and walked away into the bushes.
