I leave in two weeks. But the trip I'm taking is not the trip I described.
What changed
The expedition I wrote about was a photographic one. I would go to the southern savanna of Noel Kempff Mercado, I would look for an animal almost nobody has photographed in the wild in Bolivia, and if I was lucky I would come back with images that might make someone care about a park they've never heard of. I still believe that argument. Conservation attention does follow photography, and this animal and this landscape deserve an ambassador.
But somewhere in the reading, the trip turned into something else.
It happened by degrees. I went looking for the Emmons monograph and found, behind it, a second paper — her 2009 study in Biotropica, ten years of small-mammal trapping in the same savanna. I had mentioned in passing that the cavies vanished from the trapping plots. I hadn't understood what that sentence contained. Cavia aperea, the maned wolf's dietary mainstay, gone from both savanna plots by 2003, gone from the savanna entirely by 2007. Cavy remains in maned wolf scat: roughly eighty percent in 1996, zero percent in 2007. Scats containing only fruit: eighteen percent, rising to fifty-nine.
That's not a footnote. That's the engine of the decline. Three breeding pairs became one, and the animals were eating fruit because there was nothing else left to eat.
And then, from the genetics, a second thing I hadn't grasped. The Bolivian maned wolves are not simply the western edge of a Brazilian population. They cluster on their own — a genetically distinct management unit, a conservation priority in their own right. The samples that established this came from Los Fierros, El Refugio, Mangabalito. The exact corridor I'm walking into.
So the question stopped being can I photograph this animal and became is he still there, and has his food come back.
Nobody knows. That's the whole thing. Fifteen years, and nobody knows.
At some point I realized I was no longer planning a photography trip with a conservation rationale attached. I was planning a monitoring reconnaissance that happens to have a photographer in it.
The part where I admit what I'm not
I am not a biologist.
I want to be direct about this, because there's a version of this post that quietly implies otherwise and I don't want to write it. I have no training in wildlife ecology. I have never designed a study. Six months ago I could not have told you what a relative abundance index was, or why you would ever choose one over a density estimate, or what a thirty-minute independence threshold is for.
I've spent those months reading — the monograph, the trapping paper, the genetics, the camera-trap literature out of the Bolivian Chaco and the Brazilian cerrado — and I've built something I think is defensible. Six camera traps. Placed by landscape feature rather than on a grid: roads and linear features first, because that's the single strongest predictor of where this animal walks; waterholes, which matter more as August dries out; the savanna–forest ecotone. A relative abundance index, thirty-minute independence, analysis in camtrapR. Non-invasive throughout — no capture, no handling, no collection of anything. And a second set of eyes on the prey base, because if the cavies haven't come back, that's the finding, and a documented non-recovery is worth publishing too.
The scope is deliberately, almost aggressively modest. This is not a density study. It is not an occupancy model. It cannot identify individuals. Six cameras in a savanna where a single animal's home range can run past a hundred square kilometers is not going to tell you how many wolves there are. It can tell you whether there are any, and roughly how often they pass, and whether there's anything left for them to eat. That's it. That's the whole claim.
I've been told this is what a proof of concept looks like. I've also been told it's the honest thing to attempt. Both are probably true. It still feels presumptuous to write a methods section when you've never written one.
Because here is the thing that has been sitting with me all spring: there are people in Bolivia who have given their entire working lives to this. Botanists who have been measuring the same forest plots for thirty years. Zoologists who know the fauna of that park the way I know my own street. Guardaparques who have walked those trails for three decades on salaries that would embarrass you. People who did the real work, for a long time, mostly without recognition and often without funding.
And here I come with six cameras I bought on sale.
I'm aware of how that looks. I've been aware of it every week since I started.
What I actually bring
But I've made a kind of peace with it, and it's this.
Conservation doesn't run only on the people with doctorates. It runs, also, on people who can enable — the ones logging observations without a degree, the ones who open a door because they know someone, the ones who fund a small thing that wouldn't otherwise happen, the ones who can move a piece of equipment across a border and down a bad road because they've done it before.
I can't design a study the way a trained ecologist can. But I have spent a lot of my life in Bolivia. I speak the language as a first language. I know how the country works, and how it doesn't. I have relationships in that park and around it that took years, not weeks. I can get six cameras to a savanna that the institutions themselves struggle to reach, and I can afford to leave them there when I go.
That's not lesser. It's just different. And I suspect there are more people in that position than we usually acknowledge — people who want to help and assume they can't because they aren't the expert in the room. You don't have to be the expert. You have to be honest about which part you're able to carry.
The part I can carry is the logistics, the relationships, and the cameras. The science I'm doing carefully, with enormous respect, and with the constant awareness that I'm a guest in it.
He's still there
The best evidence I have is not scientific at all. It's three conversations.
A guardaparque I've known for a while told me he saw a solitary maned wolf near El Refugio Huanchaca in October of last year. The park's former director told me about a cría — a juvenile — on a road near Florida. A pup means a pair. A pair means the population didn't simply wink out after Emmons packed up.
None of this is data. I want to be careful about that. Three anecdotes from people who know the park is not a survey, and if I put it in a proposal I'd label it exactly what it is: unverified field report. But it's enough to justify pointing a camera at that road, and the fact that one of those sightings was on a road is a small, satisfying confirmation of everything the literature says about where this animal walks.
Retomar las investigaciones
Here's the part I didn't expect.
When I finally reached the park's interim director — a career protection officer, thirty years in the field, the sort of man who has actually been out there — he didn't treat my project as an imposition to be managed. He wrote back that it would be a pleasure to retomar las investigaciones. To resume the research.
Not "authorize your visit." Resume the research. As if it had been waiting.
And then, last week, I spoke by phone with the head of vertebrate zoology at the natural history museum in Santa Cruz — the museum that was Emmons's institutional partner for the whole Los Fierros study, and whose name is the same as the park's, both of them honoring a Bolivian biologist murdered on the Caparú plateau in 1986. Her name is in the acknowledgments of the monograph. She handled the logistics. She got the permits. Emmons calls her an invaluable friend to the work.
I had assumed, from a distance, that the study simply stopped. That's what I wrote in May — a study that simply stopped. I was wrong, and I was wrong in a way that I've been thinking about ever since.
It didn't simply stop. They tried to continue it. For years they tried — through the Smithsonian, through every channel they could find, looking for a way back in. And it didn't work. The funding dried up. The bureaucracy was impossible. The politics shifted, and shifted again. Getting into the southern sector of that park is hard in ways that have nothing to do with distance. She told me, plainly, that they gave up hope.
That is a very different thing from a study that stopped. A study that stops is inertia. This was grief.
Then she offered to write a letter of intention supporting the project.
I got a little emotional on that call, and I told her something I'll repeat here because it's true: I don't want anything out of this. Not a credit, not a career, not a species to put my name next to. I want to contribute to a park I think matters — to Bolivia, and honestly to the planet. My resources are limited. But I'll do what I can with what I have, and if this small thing turns into something larger, I'll help however I'm able.
That's the whole of it. That's the entire pitch.
What happens next
In two weeks, if everything holds, I go overland — there's no flying into this, no charter, no shortcut. Santa Cruz to Concepción to San Ignacio, then out to the edge of the park and across the river, and then the savanna. Six cameras, some scent lure, a GPS, and people who know that ground far better than I do.
The cameras stay. They're a donation to the park's protection corps, for the guardaparques who'll be there long after I've flown home. The data goes to the museum, where it belongs, in the institution that held the original study. If we find him, the record of it won't be mine. It'll be theirs. That was the point.
I still hope for the photograph. I'd be lying if I said otherwise — I'd like nothing more than for a descendant of M8 to walk past a lens at first light and let me make one frame worth hanging on a wall. That hope hasn't gone anywhere.
But it's no longer the reason. The reason now is a question with a real answer, and nobody has gone to look for fifteen years.
Now, back to the paperwork.
From The Borochi Project — field notes on maned wolf conservation in the southern sector of Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Bolivia.
Previously: ← The Last of Its Line
