Where Anteaters and Anacondas Roam, and Ranchers Are Now Rangers

16.01.2024 - 09:05 / nytimes.com

The llanos region spans more than 200,000 square miles through Colombia and Venezuela. Hot winds blow over its grassy hills, and scattered forests of Mauritius palms shelter hidden streams and lagoons. For centuries this landscape, shaped by ancient rivers, has been shared by ranchers and cattle, which learned to coexist with jaguars, panthers, anacondas, electric eels and crocodiles.

In December, Colombia declared a new national park in a corner of the llanos that borders the Manacacías River. The Manacacías joins the larger Meta River; then the Orinoco River, which forms part of the border with Venezuela; and there feeds into a tributary of the Amazon. At 263 square miles, the new park, Parque Nacional Natural Serranía de Manacacías, is not Colombia’s biggest. But from a conservation perspective it is strategic, protecting a crucial link between this vast tropical savanna and the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.

The Manacacías park is six hours from the nearest town, San Martín. To reach it, one must navigate unmarked roads across an undulating sea of green prairie grass, seldom seeing another vehicle. Cellphone signals die as the sky widens and the ubiquitous zebu cattle grow sparse.

On a ride into the nascent park in late November, just days before it was legally declared, Thomas Walschburger, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, explained why it was needed so urgently. Cattle rearing, the traditional livelihood of the region and one that was easier on its rivers and soils, was giving way to a new agricultural frontier. Fields of African oil palms, and white-trunked eucalyptus trees, were encroaching ever closer to the park’s boundaries.

The sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of the llanos can support these commercial crops only when doused with fertilizers and calcium carbonate. But intensive agriculture compromises the water, and the ability to sustain life, in a key transition zone between the llanos and the Amazon. The hope is that by protecting this small puzzle piece of savanna, a whole lot more can be saved.

The park has been in the works since 2010, when the Colombian government recognized the llanos — long viewed by the public as grassy wastelands — to be a conservation priority. A rare and fortuitous alignment of science, philanthropy and a new carbon tax allowed Manacacías to take shape, slowly and carefully, over more than a decade. During that time, a whole community had to be persuaded that it was worthwhile.

Hato Palmeras, the Rey family ranch, sits close to the Manacacías River, in the southern part of the park, surrounded by a panoramic view of prairie. Founded in the early 1950s, the ranch and its 25,000 acres of natural grasslands, palm forests and