Pantanal Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide to South America’s Great Wetland

This extensively updated second edition of Bradt’s Pantanal Wildlife remains the most user-friendly guidebook for ecotourists visiting South America’s great wetland - according to Time magazine, ’one of the world’s greatest places’. Extending across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal is the continent’s equivalent of Africa’s Serengeti: a vast territory brimming with abundant, exciting and photogenic wildlife.

The planet’s biggest wetland - 10 times larger than Florida’s Everglades - offers superlative wildlife-watching to enthral novice and expert alike. In no other New World location can visitors see at point-blank range such a high number and variety of birds (670+ species recorded), mammals (110+ species) and reptiles (50+ species).

As well as breathtaking gatherings of wildlife - with fur, feather and scale crammed into desiccating water bodies during the dry season - record-breakers of the natural world can be easy to spot here. Visitors have excellent opportunities to watch the New World’s mightiest cat (nowhere is better to see jaguar), the world’s largest parrot (hyacinth macaw), largest rodent (the pig-sized capybara), the planet’s greatest gathering of crocodilians (yacaré caiman) and South America’s heaviest land mammal (lowland tapir).

Both a wildlife guide and a travel guidebook, Pantanal Wildlife is designed for visitors who want to recognise the animals they see, to understand more about them and to learn where to look for them - but are too conscious of their baggage allowance to bring a shelf-full of reference material. It comprises authoritative yet accessible text by a South American wildlife expert, bringing remarkable animals to life through highly readable snippets on behaviour and biology, derived from the latest science.

Bradt’s Pantanal Wildlife remains the only portable, hard-copy guidebook to focus entirely on the best wildlife-watching experience in South America, the only book to feature all major faunal groups - and the only guide to cover the entire Pantanal, combining up-to-date visitor advice on where to stay, tips on exactly where to look for the most exciting wildlife and insights into getting around in each of the three countries it encompasses. Bradt’s Pantanal Wildlife is the indispensable travel companion - truly a visitor’s guide - to this exhilarating region.

James Lowen (jameslowen.com) has been immersed in all aspects of natural history since he was able to walk, and is now a fully-fledged nature writer, editor, guide and photographer. James has written 15 books about wildlife and travel, landing two Travel Guidebook of the Year awards (plus two ’shortlistings’), a Nautilus Book Silver Award and a 2022 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing longlisting. A self-confessed South America addict, he became hooked when spending three teenage months surveying wildlife in Paraguayan rainforests. In total, he has spent five years working in this great, wildlife-rich continent and is rarely happier than when seeking jaguars in the Pantanal, antpittas in the Andes or penguins in Patagonia. When confined to the UK, James scratches his tropical-Americas itch by editing Neotropical Birding, the only magazine focusing exclusively on birdwatching in Latin America, and the ornithological journal Cotinga, which also focuses on the New World tropics.