This project did not become real through paperwork. It became real through people who chose to help a stranger.
Retomar las investigaciones
Having lived already many years in Bolivia, I'd braced myself for bureaucracy. What I found instead was a series of human beings who kept opening doors for me.
When I finally reached the park's interim director — a career protection officer, thirty years in the field — I somewhat expected my proposal to be treated as a file to process. To my surprise, 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 his world had simply been waiting for someone to come back for it.
Later, when a question came up about how an outside researcher might formally affiliate with the work, he didn't send me off to navigate it alone. He personally carried the question into a meeting at the museum.
A monitoring officer at the national parks service answered my questions from the field and apologized — apologized — for a bureaucracy she was actively guiding me through.
Every step forward on this project has happened because someone decided to help. That is the whole story of how this got off the ground, and I don't want the technical accomplishments that follow to obscure it.
A homecoming I didn't engineer
Here is the part that still boggles my mind.
The natural history museum in Santa Cruz that partners on this work is the same institution that was home to the foundational maned wolf study fifteen years ago. And the museum scientist who would be this project's counterpart turns out to be named in the acknowledgments of that original monograph. She helped run the study the first time — handled the logistics, obtained the permits. The author of that foundational work calls her an invaluable friend to it.
I didn't consciously connect the dots. I went looking for a maned wolf and found my way, by a chain of coincidences that stopped feeling like coincidences, into the exact institutional home where the original work had lived. This isn't about an outsider arriving to fill a gap. It's a project landing back where it belongs, in the hands of the people who did it first and never stopped wishing they could continue.
They are the heroes of this. I want to be clear about that, because what comes next is the part I actually built — and it's the smaller part.
What a facilitator can bring
Somewhere in all this I had to make peace with a plain fact: I'm not a biologist. I arrived with six trail cameras bought on sale, into a scientific world built by people who have given their working lives to it.
So what does someone like me actually bring? Not expertise. The honest answer is the ability to enable — the language, the relationships, the logistics, the cameras that stay behind. And one more thing I didn't expect to matter as much as it did: the discipline to build the boring (well, with a bit of intellectual fun along the way...) infrastructure correctly, so that the data this project produces is credible and usable by the people who receive it.
That infrastructure is a small GIS system, and building it right turned out to be a form of respect.
The field problem is specific. The southern savanna of the park has no mobile coverage and few roads. Data captured out there has to survive with no connectivity and come home clean — and, most importantly, the camera stations have to be relocatable, so that whatever we record this season can be resurveyed in a future one. A notebook and a handheld GPS can log a point. They can't guarantee that the next person to visit that spot records the same things, the same way, so the two seasons can be compared. That guarantee is the difference between a baseline and a pile of waypoints. (Ask me how I know about waypoints haha.)
So the setup is deliberate. Field data is captured offline on a phone and synced to the desktop mapping software only once back in range of our Starlink antenna. Every station is recorded through a form with enforced fields — the camera height, the habitat type, the feature it's set on, the lure, the date — chosen from dropdowns rather than typed, so nothing arrives misspelled, blank, or in three different formats. Offline satellite (ESRI) imagery rides along, because you can't load a map with no signal. None of this is especially sexy. All of it is the difference between data a museum can actually use and data it politely files away.
The placement of the cameras isn't arbitrary either — it's the animal's own ecology turned into a map. The strongest predictor of where this wolf travels is linear features: unpaved roads and trails. So those come first. (The most encouraging sighting I have is of a juvenile seen, fittingly, on a road.) Waterholes matter more as the dry season deepens; the savanna-and-forest edge matters as habitat. The design weights all three, in the order the science says to.
That's the part I can carry. Not the biology — the enabling of it, done carefully enough to honor the people it's for.
A note on how this was managed
So... I'll be candid about one of the tools, because I'd rather say it than not.
The sheer volume of material behind this project — decades of scientific literature, the institutional history of three organizations, the GIS, months of correspondence across two languages — is more than one person, me, working alone in my (way too messy upstairs office, in spite of the cabinets my wife had built for me last year) can hold in my head. I've used AI as a tool to help manage, synthesize, and organize that flood: to keep track, to cross-reference, to draft and redraft. It has been, in a real sense, another way that a person without an institution behind him can attempt serious work.
I want to be precise about what that means and doesn't. The tool helped me handle information. It did not do the legwork for me, make the decisions, build the relationships, or get on the plane. The judgment is mine, the relationships are mine and were earned over years, and, most importantly perhaps, the responsibility is mine. If there's a lesson in here, it's the same lesson as the rest of this post: there are more ways to contribute to work like this than we usually admit, and you don't have to be the expert in the room to carry a real part of the load.
The heroes
In a couple of weeks — the timing is still working itself out, around forest fires, processes and Pachamama — I'll head to the park. Overland, the only way in when one can't afford a private plane ride. And when I leave, the cameras stay. They're a donation to the park's protection corps, to the guardaparques who will still be walking those trails long after I've gone home, on salaries that would embarrass you (and me), for reasons that have nothing to do with recognition. The data goes to the museum, to the scientists who anchored this work fifteen years ago and never gave up hoping to return to it.
If we find him — a descendant of the wolf in that first photograph — the record won't be mine. It'll be theirs. That was always the point.
I'm the messenger here. The facilitator. The one who could get six cameras down a bad road because he'd driven it before, and speak the language, and knew who to call. The heroes are the ones who spent their lives on this ground, and the ones who answered a stranger's letter with an open door.
I just get to help carry it for a while.
Now — back to the weeds.
From The Borochi Project — field notes on maned wolf conservation in the southern sector of Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Bolivia.
Previously: ← A Study that Simply Stopped
Next: The Road to Florida →
