There is a photograph at the front of Louise Emmons's monograph that I find I cannot stop returning to.
A male maned wolf — Chrysocyon brachyurus, the tallest canid in the world — sits in the long grass of the Los Fierros savanna, a newly fitted GPS collar visible against the dark mane along his neck. The animal is identified in the caption only as M8. He is one of fourteen individuals captured during the ten-year Smithsonian study of the Noel Kempff maned wolf population. His collar would later record some of the most detailed activity data ever gathered for the species. The photograph itself is unremarkable as wildlife photography goes — direct, documentary, taken at the moment of release. But there is something in the animal's posture, in the way he sits and looks past the camera at a landscape he is about to disappear into, that has stayed with me since the first time I saw it.
He looks like the last of his kind.
In an evolutionary sense, that is almost what he is.
What He Is
The maned wolf is not a wolf. He is not a fox. He is not closely related to either, despite the name. He is the sole living member of his genus, the last surviving lineage of an ancient cohort of large South American canids that vanished, with the rest of the late Pleistocene megafauna, somewhere between thirteen and ten thousand years ago. His closest living relative is the bush dog — a small, short-legged, pack-hunting forest animal whose ecology could hardly be more different from his own. Everything else in his family tree is gone.
He stands nearly a meter at the shoulder, on legs so long that he cannot trot in the usual canid manner; the gait is wrong for his proportions. He walks instead with a smooth, ipsilateral pace — both legs on one side moving together — that gives him the strange appearance of gliding through the grass. The coat is a deep golden-red, the legs nearly black, the throat sometimes white, the mane along the back of the neck and shoulders dark and erectile. When he is alarmed, the mane stands up. He has been described, accurately and not unkindly, as a fox on stilts.
His diet is half fruit. This is the detail that surprises everyone. The largest canid in South America, an animal built like a predator, lives on a diet split almost exactly between small prey — rodents, birds, the occasional armadillo — and the fruits of the savanna shrubs his height allows him to reach. Solanum gomphodes, a tomato relative, hangs in clusters above the heads of competing mammals. Alibertia edulis grows on shrubs throughout the cerrado. He eats them by the dozen, picks them from the plant before they fall, and disperses their seeds across home ranges that can run to a hundred square kilometers. Without him, those plants would lose one of their primary dispersers. He is not a predator who happens to eat fruit. He is a fruit-eater built on a predator's frame, and the evolutionary geometry of him exists nowhere else in the canid family.
He travels alone, though he forms monogamous pairs that share contiguous territories without overlapping them. He marks his ground with urine so distinctive in scent — pungent, faintly cannabis-like — that human researchers learn to recognize it within days. He calls at dawn and dusk with a deep, single, far-carrying bark that is unmistakable once heard. He sleeps in hollows under tall bunchgrass, and he moves to a new bed every day.
He is, by almost any measure, the most ecologically singular large mammal in the cerrado.
How He Came Into Focus
The maned wolf came into my awareness slowly.
As I'd worked to understand Noel Kempff over the years — its rivers, its forests, its birds especially — I had encountered the species in passing. A line in a checklist. A photograph in a guidebook. Another large mammal among the others a complete account of the park would need to mention. It registered, but only barely.
That changed when I found Louise Emmons.
Her ten-year study of the maned wolves of Los Fierros — published in 2012 as a Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology monograph, still the definitive scientific record of the species in Bolivia — moved the animal out of the inventory column and into something far harder to look away from. Suddenly there were individuals: M8 with his ear-tag and his collar, F3 with her piloerection in long grass, a female who twice stayed on her natal territory and inherited it on the older female's death. There was a fascinating history — the last survivor of a Pleistocene canid lineage that South America otherwise lost entirely. There was a precarious present: three breeding pairs declining to one over the course of the study, in a savanna increasingly stressed by drought and fire. And there was, perhaps most arrestingly, an unknowable future. The work stopped in 2011. Whether the descendants of those animals still walk the same termite plains is not something anyone currently knows.
It is a strange thing, to find oneself drawn to a creature mostly through the absence of recent attention to it.
The Emmons Study and What Followed
The Emmons work itself is remarkable, and worth understanding in its specifics. Between 2001 and 2011, a research team based at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collected over 37,000 GPS locations from ten individual maned wolves in the Los Fierros savanna. They documented activity patterns to the hour, mapped home ranges across multiple years, analyzed hundreds of scats to reconstruct seasonal diet, tracked pups from birth, and watched a small population respond to a decade of accumulating environmental pressure. The resulting monograph is 135 pages and remains, fourteen years later, the most thorough behavioral study of the species ever conducted anywhere in its range.
What the team documented at the end was a population in decline. Three breeding pairs at the beginning of the study had become a single solitary pair by the end. Cavies — the small relatives of guinea pigs that had been a dietary mainstay for decades — had vanished from the trapping plots. Dry-season rainfall had fallen steadily across the study years, from a maximum of 172 mm in 2002 to 20 mm in 2010. In September and October of 2009, nearly the entire Los Fierros savanna burned over six weeks. Two of the resident adult maned wolves disappeared after that fire and were not seen again.
Then the study ended.
In the decade and more since, no comparable in-situ research has been undertaken on the Bolivian population. The IUCN currently lists the species as Near Threatened, with a global estimate of approximately seventeen thousand mature individuals, more than ninety percent of them in Brazil. The Bolivian populations are described in the conservation literature as small, isolated, and declining, with status that the IUCN itself characterizes as "even more precarious" than the species' overall classification suggests. What is happening at Los Fierros specifically — whether the population has continued to decline, stabilized, or partially recovered — is something nobody outside the park can currently answer.
This is the gap that has caught my attention.
What Photography Can Do
There is an honest argument to be made that conservation attention follows photography. Species with iconic photographic representation receive disproportionate research funding, protection, and public recognition. The maned wolf has never had that record. There are excellent photographs of the animal in captivity — the Smithsonian's National Zoo population has been extensively documented — but the body of strong field photography from the wild is sparse, and the body of strong photography from the Bolivian population is essentially nonexistent outside the Emmons monograph itself.
Noel Kempff Mercado has the same problem. It is one of the most ecologically significant protected areas in South America — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, larger than Connecticut, holding intact tracts of Amazon forest, cerrado savanna, and the extraordinary Huanchaca tableland that may have inspired Conan Doyle's Lost World. And almost nobody has heard of it. It has no photographic ambassador, no recognizable visual identity, nothing that makes a casual viewer pause and want to know more.
The maned wolf could plausibly be that ambassador. He is photogenic in the way the most compelling wildlife subjects are photogenic — not in spite of his strangeness but because of it. The proportions. The mane. The motion through grass. The quality of light at dawn and dusk on the termite plains, which is when he is most active and when the savanna itself looks most like what it is. The animal and the landscape belong to each other in a way that photography is uniquely positioned to make visible.
None of this is a substitute for science, or for institutional conservation work, or for the on-the-ground efforts of SERNAP and the guardaparques who actually protect this place. But it can do something those efforts cannot, which is to put an image of this animal and this landscape into the imaginations of people who have never heard of either.
That is reason enough to try.
At the Edge of the Termite Plain
In August, when the dry season is at its most uncompromising and the surface water has all but disappeared, the maned wolves of Los Fierros come out to walk. They travel further on those nights than at any other time of year — fourteen kilometers, on average, through grass that hides them well — pausing at the few remaining waterholes, marking the same termite mounds they have marked all their lives, returning by morning to a different bed than the one they left.
This is what we will be looking for. Not the wolf itself, necessarily — though we hope for that. Even more, the signs: the pungent scent on an exposed root, the long narrow tracks on a sandy stretch of trail, the deep call at first light that carries across the savanna as it has carried for longer than any of us can quite imagine.
The Smithsonian's National Zoo, which coordinates the global maned wolf conservation program, sits ten miles from where I'm writing this. Louise Emmons did her institutional work at the same Smithsonian. When I return from Bolivia, I plan to be in touch with the people there — to understand the current state of research, to share what we observe, and to find out whether the Los Fierros population her monograph chronicled has any ongoing connection to the larger conservation effort, or whether it remains, as it appears from a distance, a study that simply stopped.
For now, the savanna waits. Somewhere in it, if we are lucky, a descendant of M8 or F3 will pass within sight of us at first light or last. If that happens, I will imagine the animal as a breath perhaps exhaled by his ancestor so many years ago, captured by Louise Emmons and recorded in her testament of one beast's life.
That is reason enough to go.
Louise H. Emmons (ed.), The Maned Wolves of Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology No. 639 (2012). The full monograph is available open-access through the Smithsonian Institution's digital repository.
