The Giant Anteater of Chuchini!!!
If you’ve read the title of this post.. then you already know which animal sighting got us overly excited while walking one of the trails in Chuchini on our day off 🙂 🙂
If you’ve skipped the title and just started reading… you missed the spoiler!!! And I can tell you now that we saw… wait for it…a GIANT ANTEATER…
We’ve dreamed of seeing a giant anteater for a long time… definitely for as long as this blog has existed – you will have noted – I’m sure – the picture of the giant anteater in the header… and since starting this trip there have been several days when we were in giant anteater territory that we have left feeling a little more than disappointed that we didn’t get to see one…
In Chuchini luck was on our side:-) 🙂 We were on the start of the ‘big loop’ trail when we heard a rustling… not a normal rustling which indicates a small bird that we’re never going to find… but a BIG rustling noise… butterflies came to my stomach – we were in jaguar territory… I doubted we’d see a jaguar BUT what if it was… we’d seen jaguar poo that morning, maybe it was back… what should we do – I knew if a jaguar came towards us, that my instinct would be to run BUT I also knew that was REALLY NOT the right thing to do if I wanted to live!?!
The rustling continued – we stood still, so as not to disturb whatever it might be… our silence and stillness paid off – we got our first glimpse through the trees… an ANTEATER… I wanted to scream and shout and dance… I managed to contain myself… as did PB… but the BIG grin on his face said it all 🙂 🙂
We wondered if this would be our only glimpse of this magnificent animal… but more luck was on our side… he didn’t see us OR run in the other direction (we later read that giant anteaters don’t have great eyesight and that their ears are small so probably don’t hear that great either… instead they rely of their great sense of smell – we mustn’t have smelt threatening 🙂 )… but instead he carried on in his normal manner, totally ignoring us 🙂 🙂 he even walked straight in front of us and continued down OUR trail…
Unable to get close to him we carried on down the trail – stopping at a clearing in the hope that he too would continue his journey down the big loop trail… we weren’t disappointed…
We stayed with the giant anteater for a good 45 minutes… until he walked off into the jungle… it was an amazing sighting… and here are some more pictures of the giant anteater as we silently and patiently watched him 🙂 🙂
And, so you can see the anteater in action – here’s a video of him that we took 🙂 🙂
We loved many things about Chuchini… BUT seeing the giant anteater was the icing on the cake…