This was my overseas placement, after which I started the ongoing Autumn Crocus Project in Calderdale as part of the contract. I saw many more animals, large and small, than I can write about. If you travel to the Pantanal, there’s no guarantee that all the same wildlife will be seen.

It was with relief we finally finished a bumpy flight in a five seater plane, landing on grass in the heart of the Pantanal region of southern Brazil. This is a vast plain of natural grassland with meandering rivers which are bordered with thick forest.

There are many lakes, as we had seen from the plane, either recent oxbows where the river has taken a shortcut across a meander, leaving a “C” shaped lake, or they are depressions in the landscape filled only by rain with no exit so they are salty and thus have an incredibly rich bird fauna living on the small creatures in the sun-warmed shallows. Pink spoonbills are among the many impressive birds. We waded Into these salty lakes or Salinas, to markers to take readings of depth and temperature.

Other work is to follow trails through the forest, keeping them open with machetes, finding pre-marked trees and re-measuring their girth. Samples of fruit or flowers are collected and sent to universities, as many trees have not been studied or even named.

Along the river Giant Otters could be seen whilst we fished or canoed. One eerily swam right under us in the opaque water and reappeared at the other side. They seem as big as Labradors, plus the long tail of a typical otter, but hard to photograph. I only got heads. Their squealing echoed up and down the river when they were about, mingling with the cries of monkeys.

The fishing was an angler’s dream; usually the bait was taken in minutes. Big piranhas (nearly a foot - 28cm) whose jagged teeth we had to be wary of and various catfish from the bottom, one kind clucking like a hen whilst being weighed and measured before being put back. Certain kinds were kept and dissected at the lab. We first sewed them into mesh bags before boiling them well. Then every bone down to the last tiniest one had to be tweezered out, labelled and stored away.

By some stroke of luck I was never on the team which collected otter spraints from the river banks. These have to be gone through and all the fish bones picked out to learn about the otters’ diet. There is a smaller species of otter there as well as the giant, the Neotropical Otter.

Horses enabled us to make longer treks out into the grasslands, and we rode in the straight-legged western style, on comfortable sheep fleece saddles. We were shown the footprints of a Jaguar in the dusty track by the excited ecologists. Often this is all that is ever seen of them, though there are herds of their favourite prey, peccaries, coming close to the research centre. They come at night and “rotavate” stretches of the river banks with their snouts looking for food.