Chaco Peccaries

Three Chacoan peccaries on a track through the thorn forest of Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco, Bolivia. The species is listed as Endangered, and the mapping behind that listing shows the pressure landing on habitat quality. Between 1985 and 2015 the total area of suitable habitat across the Gran Chaco fell about 9 percent, from 715,833 to 654,104 square kilometers. Over the same thirty years the share of it that was both highly suitable and lightly hunted dropped from 22 percent to 11 percent.

Roads are part of that arithmetic. Chaco thorn forest is close to impassable on foot until clearing opens it, so new tracks deliver hunting access along with everything else, and Romero-Muñoz and colleagues found the combined footprint of clearing and hunting spreading across roughly 40 percent of the region, about twice the area actually cleared. By 2015 the large blocks of lightly hunted ground left to the species were essentially Kaa-Iya and the country immediately around it.

That ground is protected because the people who live there asked for it. Kaa-Iya covers 34,411 square kilometers of thorn forest and dry savanna, created by Bolivian decree in September 1995 and the first national park in the Americas proposed by an Indigenous organization, the Capitanía de Alto y Bajo Isoso, which then administered it alongside the national government. The presence of the Chacoan peccary was one of the reasons for drawing the boundaries where they were drawn.

For years the only local records of the animal came from hunters, 22 taken in the Isoso between 1997 and 2007, until camera traps run by Izoceño field technicians found it at five new places in the landscape. Izoceño hunters had been recording their own catch since 1996, more than 7,000 ungulates and armadillos logged between 2002 and 2007, and the communities used those records to set their own limits. The ban they placed on hunting the Chacoan peccary in 2005 is indefinite and still stands.