Savana, Queen of the Desert

It is that beguiling hour betwixt day and night, when the sky is fast transforming from tangerine to mauve and buriti trees are stark in silhouette, as we set out in search of a female maned wolf named Savana — not actually a wolf at all but the largest member of the South American Canidae family, which includes dogs and foxes. She’s an alpha female with responsibilities (three hungry puppies lie hidden in her den) and at sunset she begins her hunt for small mammals such as cavy, a common rodent like a guinea pig. I’m deep within Brazil’s Cerrado desert, which covers two million square kilometers (772,000 square miles, or 21 percent of Brazil). This is the country’s second largest biome, after the Amazon. 

My first ever sighting of a maned wolf was on television, in the episode on “Deserts & Grasslands” of the BBC’s award-winning series, Planet Earth III. In this, they filmed Nhorinha (Savana’s mother), and her various packs of pups, over a period of three years, fighting for survival within the Cerrado’s fragile eco-system, devastated by soy production. 

Although National Geographic Traveller recently listed the Cerrado in their top destinations for 2025, it remains a road less traveled (located 207 miles, to be exact, over wide-open spaces from the capital Brasilia). The last 90 minutes of this journey is a boneshaker across sandy, pot-holed roads and smaller tracks. 

Sustainable Comfort

My base for exploring is where the BBC film crew stayed: Pousada Trijuncao, a seven-room eco-lodge set in 33,000 protected hectares (82,000 acres), which sits at the border point of the Bahia, Goias, and Minas Gerais states. An understated luxury is achieved with a rustic-chic design of wood and thatch, in keeping with the environment, but it’s the wildlife that provide the finishing details — such as the toco toucan, with magnificent jet-black plumage and shiny yellow beak, that I spot sitting in a cashew tree, and ‘Hannah’, the rotund, resident labyrinth pepper frog, that lives in the lily pond by the restaurant.  

Most small group activities, including tracking the near-endangered maned wolf, take place at the beginning and end of the day, and are led by a biologist or conservationist from NGO Oncafari, who combine ecotourism with scientific study, wildlife preservation, and conservation work. Our guide, Chiara Bortoloto, expertly adjusts an antenna, which she’s holding aloft from the safari vehicle, primed for picking up Savana’s signal. (The wolf is radio collared for her own protection.) Picking up a faint beep, Chiara gives us a thumbs up. “She’s nearby, and if we’re lucky she’ll cross the road up ahead on her way to her favorite hunting ground,” she says, pointing to a wide-open field, once used for soy production but now left fallow. “Be on the lookout for termite mounds because maned wolves like to do their business on top so that their scent can be spread further over their territory.” 

To tread in the footsteps of the great British naturalist Sir David Attenborough, narrator of the Planet Earth series, I must be patient. The Cerrado is home to over 200 species of mammals, 180 species of reptiles, 90 million species of insects, and 11,000 plant species (often endangered), but a safari here is an exercise in slow travel. Sightings of mammals are sporadic but rapidly increasing thanks to more than 90 percent of Trijuncao’s territory being preserved. This includes ….

By Kate Wickers

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