Day 12 of the Pantanal of Brazil

I photographed the Jabiru Stork nest as the sun was rising at 6 am.

Breakfast wasn’t until 7 am, so I used the time to wander the grounds and photograph families of Capybara.  

We were moving on to our next lodge after breakfast, but I had some free time before we left having packed quickly.

I photographed a beautiful Southern Lapwing on the lodge grounds. 

And down by the river, a Scaled Dove.

Here’s the river we boated on the two previous afternoons. That is not the boat we took.

The Capybara worked their way down to the river and then swam across.

Back up near the lodge, I photographed a Yellow-billed Cardinal.

I found some exposed horizontal roots of a huge old tree quite interesting. I use my iPhone for these.

We continued back north along the Transpantaneira. Local cars drive this quite bumpy road fast and create a lot of dust.

Again, we found some cattle walking along the road. I took this photo with my iPhone. You can see a bit of my face in the rearview mirror. The hand on the right side of the image is mine holding my phone.

The side road into our last Pantanal lodge was 7 miles long. Most of these lodges are part of very large ranches. Before we reached the lodge, we detoured off the entrance road to a pool frequented by wildlife .

At the pool, we found some Azaras Capuchin monkeys, also called Hooded Capuchin monkeys.

Nothing was planned until around 2:30 pm when we would head back to the pool. In the interim, I took a few photos on the grounds of the lodge.

 

 

 

 

 

We sat for almost 4 hours at the wildlife pool.

At times it was quite boring, and Petr decided to take a nap.

We saw the Azaras Capuchin monkeys again, and over a few hours I photographed several birds at the pool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But my main effort was to try to capture photos of Sunbitterns with their wings spread. I was only marginally successful. Here are three photos I took.

It was getting quite dark around 5 pm when an Azaras Agouti came to the pool.

Well after the sunset, a pair of Brazilian Tapir came to the pool, drank, and then walked into the field to the left of the pool and then into the woods.

Here is an eight-photo panorama taken at 5:50 pm after the Tapirs disappeared.

We were back at the lodge at 6:15 pm and heading for dinner.