Nigel Marven travels to Brazil in pursuit of the
amazing jaguar in this action-packed six-part

series. Jaguar Adventure follows Nigel to the
Pantanal, the world’s biggest wetland and home
to the planet’s largest population of jaguars – the
least known of the big cats. In the opening
episode, Nigel tussles with a caiman; endures a
painful encounter with a false water cobra;
glimpses an elusive tapir; and interrupts a pair of
mating anacondas.
Nigel Marven’s latest quest has brought him to the
swampland of the Pantanal in Brazil. Standing
between the Amazon rainforest and the
grasslands of the savannah, the Pantanal is home
to a stunning diversity of wildlife, including
armadillos, giant otters, iguanas and anteaters.
“This place is brilliant – every bit as exotic as the
Amazon,” Nigel says.
In just four weeks, Nigel hopes to get to know
the vast array of wildlife on offer and locate one
beautiful but hard-to-find mammal. “My main
mission is to track down a rare and mysterious big
cat – the jaguar,” he says. Comparatively little is
known about this member of the big cat family,
because jaguars are notoriously difficult to film.
With their brilliantly effective camouflage, jaguars
blend perfectly into the foliage. Moreover, as Nigel
discovers later in the series, they have become a
sworn enemy of the ranchers to the south.
Farmers shoot jaguars to stop them preying on
their cattle, driving them deeper into the forest
and making them wary of human intruders.
It is Nigel’s ambition to encounter these
extraordinary beasts in the wild, but to have any
chance of seeing them in such a short space of
time, he must head to an area of the Pantanal
where reports of jaguar sightings are common.
Can he realise his childhood dream of meeting
jaguars in the wild?
In the first episode of the series, Nigel arrives in
the giant swamps of the Pantanal and makes the
acquaintance of an old friend – the spectacled
caiman. There are an estimated ten million of
these scaly crocodilian reptiles in the region, and
Nigel – who had a pet caiman as a teenager – is
keen to get a closer look. To this end, he wades
into the swamp and wrestles one into his grip.
Keeping its jaws tightly shut, he is able to study
the creature’s remarkable eyes and teeth.
Elsewhere, Nigel encounters a false water
cobra, which quickly locks it jaws around his hand
in a bid to break free. “It’s flattening its ribs to
actually look like a cobra, which is why it gets its
common name,” he says. Fortunately, this impostor is non-venomous – although it manages
to make a bloody mess of Nigel’s hand before
slithering off into the undergrowth.
Travelling through the jungle, Nigel’s team is
able to get remarkable footage of some of the
Pantanal’s other incredible residents, including a
tapir – a relative of the primitive horse and
rhinoceros – and a greater potoo, a bird which
may have the best camouflage in the world.
Sitting perfectly still in a tree, it looks exactly like a
broken branch. “The only way you can tell it’s a
living creature is when the wind ruffles its
feathers,” Nigel says.
Towards the end of his first week, Nigel again
plunges bare-footed into the swamp, this time in
search of a yellow anaconda – a smaller relative of
the giant anaconda. He makes himself unpopular
by interrupting a mating pair. On the male’s body,
he discovers tiny spurs which are the remains of
tiny limbs. “That’s proof that snakes evolved from
lizard ancestors,” he says. The male anaconda
now uses his spurs to tickle his mate. Nigel lets
the amorous couple get back to their business,
before hitting the road once again. This time he is
bound directly for the heart of the Pantanal – but
will he set eyes on his first jaguar?