Brocket Deer

The build of a brocket deer suits the country it lives in. Brockets have a compact, wedge-shaped body, short legs, and an arched back that carries the rump higher than the shoulders, a shape suited to driving through the dense thorn scrub of the Gran Chaco. Africa's forest duikers arrived at nearly the same design independently, and within South American deer the shape evolved more than once.

Brocket deer are among the most closely counted animals in the Bolivian Chaco, and the counting was done by the people who hunt them. Beginning in 1996, Izoceño-Guaraní hunters in the communities bordering Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park filled in their own record sheets, with between 100 and 150 hunters reporting in a typical month and more than 7,000 ungulates and armadillos logged in 2002 to 2007 alone. Brocket offtake looked sustainable; tapir and white-lipped peccary showed signs of overexploitation, and the communities adopted their own hunting closures in response.

The deer matter to the park's predators as well. In the first camera-trap surveys inside Kaa-Iya, brocket deer, armadillos and paca made up most of the terrestrial prey available to jaguars, and about 70 percent of the prey identified in jaguar scats.