Pablo Guerra, the jaguar biologist, explains the feline family tree. They pass around a gourd of maté, sipping through a metal straw. We are met on San Alonso by Sofia Heinonen, Rewilding Argentina's executive director, and a team of researchers who helm the station in another former Tompkins home. “Argentina could become the world's next big conservation destination.”Īrtwork in the Cueva de las Manos, or Cave of Hands, dating back nearly 10,000 years Alistair Taylor-Young “They are writing the textbook on rewilding in South America-it's cutting-edge,” Les says excitedly. He says he spent five hours tracking a white-collared peccary-one of eight locally extinct species that have been reintroduced, alongside the giant anteater, macaw, and jaguar. He remarks frequently on the explosion of wildlife since his last visit. He had last visited Iberá in 2017, when he helped Rewilding Argentina present its plan for reintroducing jaguars to wary local officials. He should know: With his striking white beard and Popeye arms, Les is a pioneer of wildlife translocations, having moved 30 white rhinos-21 of them all at once, a record at the time-to andBeyond's Phinda reserve in South Africa three decades ago. “Argentina is where Africa was 30 years ago,” says Les Carlisle, the former head of conservation for the African ecotourism company andBeyond, as we sip wine and the Southern Cross pricks through a darkening dome. Starting in the 1990s, American husband-and-wife activists Doug and Kris Tompkins, a cofounder of The North Face and Patagonia's former CEO, respectively, started buying up strategic tracts of land to protect across the two countries the NGOs spun off in 2015, after Doug was killed in a kayaking accident. This model-in which new wildernesses are secured with the creation of local jobs in ecotourism-is being adapted in South America on a huge scale by the foundations Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, heirs to the legacy of Tompkins Conservation. This has led to the restoration of massive swathes of land into flourishing, biodiverse ecosystems, sustained by income generated by tourism. More recently, Africa has inspired the most wide-reaching conservation effort ever in Argentina, a country notorious for the ravages of its beef industry. From the small plane we flew in on from Posadas, we watched the landscape tip over from cattle ranches to a flat mosaic of floating grass islands that look strikingly like Botswana's Okavango Delta, though at 1.8 million acres, the Iberá Wetlands are only about half the size. PATAGONIA BLACK HOLE CRACKEDWith the cracked yolk of the sun trickling behind a skeletal acacia tree, you could swear you were on safari in Africa-a resemblance that may be more than a wine-fueled illusion, given the Pangaea theory that South America and Africa once formed a supercontinent that broke apart more than 200 million years ago. We dismount in a savanna, where we find that staff at our lodge, Rincón del Socorro, have set a table with bottles of Argentine Malbec and a platter of local meats and cheeses. A garza mora, or cocoi heron, a bird endemic to the lowlands of Argentina Alistair Taylor-Young
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