Pantanal Suffers Historic Fire Devastation; Volunteers Fight to Save Animals

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The fires that have ravaged the Pantanal wetlands for two months are the largest in history. Data from the National Center for the Prevention and Combat of Forest Fires (PREVFOGO) show that 15 percent of the Pantanal was consumed, an area equivalent to 2.2 million hectares, or the territory of Israel. By mid-September, satellites monitoring the region for the National Space Research Institute, INPE, had already detected 12,703 active fire outbreaks, representing dozens of uncontrolled patch burn fronts. These are the highest figures since official records began in 1998.

However, more than numbers, the fires in the world’s largest floodplain are a devastating tragedy for one of the country’s most preserved biomes, home to animals extinct in other regions, such as the jaguar. Key wildlife shelters have been decimated in the vast area in the far west of Brazil, between Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul and the borders of Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay. Among these areas are the Encontro das Águas State Park, known to be home to the largest concentration of jaguars on the planet, the Perigara Indigenous Land in Mato Grosso. and part of the Serra do Amolar in Mato Grosso do Sul.

There is footage of the fires that echo the descriptions of hell by Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) . In one of the bridges of the Transpantaneira highway (MT-060), in Porto Jofre, 160 kilometers from Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul, the flames surround both sides of the dirt track. All surrounding vegetation is burning and forms a river of embers and flames, running to the horizon. The first urge is to stop the car, but the heat and the aggressivity of the fire render the adventure impossible. Domestic and wild animals run dazed on the highway amidst the smoke, to find safe spots.

“In fire situations the answer is escape. Animals run everywhere. If fires are focal it is less problematic for the fauna, but in multi-focal areas, like the one now, it is more serious. When we see animals like jaguars reacting like this, there is damage,” says researcher Dione Vênega da Conceição, professor of veterinary medicine at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT). “If the areas are constantly being damaged, the trend is for jaguars to move further and further through urban areas,” she says.

Surrounded by fire

Tour guide Abelardo Antônio da Silva, known as Tonny, 53 years old, leads the report to a hotel region, in Transpantaneira. He is part of a private brigade of hotel owners and tourism agents who joined forces to save bridges and ensure that the flames do not reach the tourist buildings and housing areas.

The teams’ effort is superhuman. Some work for three days straight non-stop, but it is an inglorious struggle. There are only 33 people taking turns in this brigade. Added to the national efforts of 122 men, there are just over 150 people fighting the fire in Mato Grosso, or only one for each 350 square kilometer area. The local logistics further complicates the scenario. It takes up to five hours to cover the 160 kilometers of Transpantaneira from the state capital. Some of the regions are so difficult to access that they require a full day’s travel. Between twenty and ten aircraft help in the fight, but the vast majority remain on the ground all day – the smoke prevents overflight. When they take off, the sight of small airplanes pouring water over kilometers of flames resembles that of a hummingbird trying to put out a fire in the forest. Poetic, but virtually useless.

The Ministry of Defense denies that the number of men is insufficient. The body’s press agent states that there are 400 men from the Armed Forces acting to fight fires in the Pantanal region. In Mato Grosso, an Operation Coordination Center was installed at the SESC Pantanal airfield in Poconé. On average, 300 men are engaged in the activities in this region, at the top of the operation, among military and officers of bodies such as the Fire Department and the official preservation and inspection agencies, ICMBio and IBAMA. The reporter did not cross paths with any of these officers, only ICMbio and PREVFOGO (IBAMA ) agents in their visit to the Pantanal, as well as the volunteer brigade.

In the access to the Rio Claro Inn, the fire again surrounds the reporter’s car. Tonny jumps from the vehicle and tries to fight the flames with a palm leaf.

We head to the hotel headquarters and warn the receptionist: “The fire is surrounding you”. She is scared and runs off. “Please tell my husband,” she says, in desperation. In less than ten minutes, the fire surrounds the place and starts to scorch everything on the horizon, raising a black smoke curtain into the sky, once blue. The cattle take shelter under a pink Ipê tree laden with flowers. Werner Luiz de Souza, the inn manager, tries to reach the owner by radio and calls the neighbors to help. A fearless pedestrian faces the flames and breaks a wire fence to save a group of horses. No one comes to the rescue. The fire devours everything, but luckily (for people), the wind carries the flames in a different direction.

Not all are equally lucky. Last week the death of a man with 100 percent of his body burned was recorded in the area of Serra do Facão. He was a 36 year-old farm worker, a zootechnician. Together with another three farm workers, he was trying to put out the fire when a gust of wind changed the direction of the flames. He was trapped in the middle of the fire. The man was rushed to the hospital in Cáceres, 220 km from the capital, underwent hemodialysis, but died on Wednesday, September 9th.

Smoking ovens

Researcher Walfrido Moraes Tomas, from EMBRAPA Pantanal, is unable to point out in scientific literature records of something similar to what has been occurring. “It is unprecedented, we are starting from scratch”, he says. He is coordinating a research project that tries to account for how many animals have been affected. The method to estimate the amount of dead animals is basically to walk through newly burned areas and count the carcasses. The greatest risk for the animals is to fall into peatfire areas – the burning of a subsoil layer – a veritable natural trap.

“In the last incursion we were very scared by the noise of the fire coming from the ground and we retreated,” recalls UFMT researcher Christine Strusman. This type of fire explains the fact that most of the animals rescued were either burnt or amputated. Two deer, a jaguar, a tapir and an ocelot were found in this situation and put down due to the severity of their injuries.

This is a very different reality from the Pantanal for Cátia Nunes da Cunha, a researcher at the National Center for Research in the Pantanal (CPP) and the National Institute of Wetlands (INAU). Born in Poconé, 100 kilometers from Cuiabá, she grew up in the region to which she devoted forty years of research. “I remember my childhood, between the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a long drought. Everything was grey and the land was always exposed. There was constant dust, but I don’t remember a fire like the one I see today,” she says. “This year I saw horrifying scenes in my visits to the region.”

Devastation

Even apparently positive news hides traps. It is estimated that the fire outbreaks concentrated in the regions of Poconé, Barão de Melgaço and Porto Jofre, in Mato Grosso, have been reduced by over 72 percent, according to a report by the Mato Grosso Fire Department. The outbreaks in the SESC Pantanal Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN), one of the most affected areas, have also been reduced by 97 percent. However, there is a sad reality behind this reduction.

“The fire has really been reduced, but this is because everything has been destroyed,” sums up Eduardo Falcão, tense, on the phone. While he speaks, the local resident and owner of the Jaguar Ecological Reserve Inn, on the Transpantaneira highway, directs one more of his fauna rescue operations. Two jaguars that used to mate at the Encontro das Águas State Park are completely burned and agonizing. His son João Falcão and two volunteer vets travel by boat to the Três Rios stream to save these animals. Eduardo built an enclosure to shelter the animals saved from the flames. Some of them were rushed to the Veterinary Hospital of the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), others were taken to safe areas.

The Falcão are descendants of a great jaguar hunter, who ultimately became a protectionist because of tourism. Eduardo has rescued several animals, from jaguars to tapirs, deer and quatis. Not all rescues are successful. An example is the jaguar that the group tried to rescue in the region of Corixo Negro: “She is very upset. Yesterday we tried to anesthetize her for capture, and she pulled out the dart and ran into the bush. A wounded animal is very dangerous,” he says, worried about his son and the vets who have been there for over twenty days.

In the short term, the situation should not experience any relief: the scientific institutes forecast that the rains will only reach the Pantanal in October.

Uncertain future

The impact of the destruction of natural refuges in the Pantanal is also unknown to researchers. “We know that many animals flee and take refuge. But we are dealing with a chain. The river snakes are certainly among the most affected group. And they serve as population control and food for other animals,” explains researcher Christine Strusman. “The highlands I visited were intensely destroyed. How will the blue macaws build natural nests without the trees that burned and how will they feed without the fruits of bocaiuva and bacuri [palms], we still do not know,” adds researcher Cátia Nunes.

Even aquatic animals will be affected. Fish, for instance, depend on the relationship with the flora. “The pacus are linked to the fruits, as the one traditionally known as ‘laranjinha’ and ‘tucum’. How these fish will deal with the scarcity of these foods is something that can have repercussions throughout the Paraguay River basin, extending beyond Brazil’s borders,” continues Nunes.

Scientists are also unable to say how or when the region’s biome will be able to regenerate one day. “The Pantanal is, in part, resilient to fire, because it keeps some manifestations of the Cerrado (tropical savanna ecoregion) in its structure, a vegetal landscape adapted to the fires. But there are also many dry forests and flooded forests that are unable to respond the same way. The areas with pink Ipê trees could be completely lost,” explains Nunes.

The INAU researcher alerts to the false signs that everything will be fine after the fire. “Generally after big fires the landscape reacts with a quick layer of very green grass. Everything seems to be fine. But if we look closely, we will see that it is not a mimoso grass (Axonopus purpusii), native to the biome and very rich, but something poorer and with much less biodiversity,” says Nunes.

Mato Grosso is home to 35 percent of the Pantanal biome, some 52 million hectares, and the fire has already destroyed almost a quarter of it. It is in this state, in Diamantino, that the Paraguay river springs are located, the main originator of the biome, the result of a water dynamic dependent on these Mato Grosso highlands. “In the continental portion of the Pantanal, everything is the Chaco. From Bolivia to Paraguay there is only one semi-arid region, almost deserted. Without these springs (in Mato Grosso) we do not know how far the Chaco could extend. It was the rivers in the highlands, and their flood pulse, that changed the local landscape,” explains the researcher.

Cold fire

In an area surrounded by pink Piúva trees, we managed to spot a marsh deer, woolly monkeys, blue macaws, a group of quatis and an anteater. The fire did not reach the inn of Luiz Vicente da Silva Campos Filho, 57 years old. The place is a respite to the eyes of those who only saw destruction along the road. Vicente says he uses his own methods to prevent the fires, but he evades disclosing his techniques. Vicente says that his property is wetter than the others. Only after a long conversation, he eventually advocates the use of so-called cold fire. The word defines how the traditional Pantanal peoples call the technique of creating small fire fronts during the rains to reduce the vegetal biomass, the main cause of the great fires that today devastate the Pantanal.

Paradoxically, it is this use of fire that can save the Pantanal from fire. “Field cleaning is the solution,” says Eduardo Falcão. “There has never been a fire of this magnitude before because, in the past, the Pantanal used fire to prevent fire. Now they banned it and this big fire came. Now they must rethink this,” he says. Current legislation bans the use of fire in all respects. Only through a complex process at the Mato Grosso State Environmental Secretariat (SEMA-MT), through technical monitoring and consulting, can the flames be used. Fire use is restricted to large landowners, which excludes the small and medium-size farmers in the Pantanal. Rural landowners demand that the rules be reconsidered. The State of Mato Grosso has opened a front for debate in the State Legislative Assembly in an attempt to change the legislation.

According to an expert report published by SEMA-MT, the largest fires in the Mato Grosso Pantanal were caused by human intervention and also by the collapse of power cables. However, the Pantanal portions of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay are also suffering from large fires. Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of the United Nations, made up of over 250 scientists from all over the world, pointed out fifteen years ago that the projection for regions like the Pantanal was for large fires and semi-desertification after 2020 – the same year as the great fires. “It’s global warming, it’s here. Now we have to learn ways to mitigate these fires which were projected years ago,” says Walfrido Tomas, from EMBRAPA-Pantanal.

Source: El Pais

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