Manjula goes blogging...

Imagine sharing your nesting beach with jaguars! This was one of the highlights of the seven months I spent in Tortuguero. It was thrilling to read in the sand where he had rested the previous night, where his tail had lain, how his tracks had changed from a steady walk to a run or a pounce. Ever so often a nesting green turtle would fall prey to his powerful jaws (Troëng 2000). Most green turtles were flipped over on to their carapace with their heads torn off and loosely attached to the body by some skin. Sometimes the turtles were immediately dragged off into the vegetation with blood, eggs (shelled and unshelled) and body parts scattered along the path. On other days, the turtle was just left on the beach or dragged later, usually by the hind flipper, into the vegetation. With all the time I was spending on the beach and crawling in the vegetation to see where the jaguar had taken the turtle, an encounter with the beast was inevitable.

It was about 6.45 am, Luciano and I were walking down the beach, counting the number of nests and halfmoons from the previous night in each of my experimental plots. I was reading something in my notebook, when I heard Luciano say, "Oh shit Manjula! the jaguar!" Sure enough, at about 50m from us, sitting up near the vegetation, was a big, magnificent jaguar surveying the beach on either side! Wow!!! We went into an extreme emotional state - panic, excitement, disbelief -and walked backwards to the tide line with the thought of swimming into the ocean if necessary - incidentally, the ocean there is full of bull sharks and jaguars can swim too! A little later, the jaguar got up, swished his tail, and went back into the vegetation. That wasn’t the last we saw of him that day.

Same day, 10.40 am, we passed that section of beach again. I decided to check out the place where the jaguar had been sitting. I walked ahead along the vegetation and saw some very fresh tracks and then a dead turtle lying just inside the vegetation. As I was describing this aloud to Luciano, I suddenly noticed the jaguar sitting next to the turtle, less than 3m from me! Again, we went into an emotional spasm and ran down to the water. But we so much wanted another glimpse of this elusive, beautiful animal, so we crawled up the beach with stout sticks and some powerful pepper spray….we chickened out before we got too close to the vegetation and headed back to the field station to tell our story….

As far as I know, there is little documentation of jaguars attacking humans. In the few jaguar encounters on Tortuguero beach, the jaguar has never attempted an attack. In fact, one time when Luciano unknowingly stumbled on to a jaguar feeding on a turtle, the jaguar just stood up on the turtle and roared at him….