Jaguars, ranchers and one camera in the Cerrado

Everything Pró-Onça has filmed so far, every video and every story from the field, was made with a phone and one camera. "No mics, no proper recorder, nothing," Letícia Benavalli says. "And honestly, we've done a lot with that little."

She is the founder and executive director of Pró-Onça, which works on jaguar and carnivore conservation in the Cerrado, Brazil. Much of it is field work: camera traps, tracking, going out and talking to the rural communities who live alongside these animals every day.

“we work with rural women and youth, because conservation in the Cerrado doesn't work if the communities living there aren't part of it and don't see themselves in it.”

Letícia Benavalli

Day to day, she says, the work has a few fronts. There is the conflict side. Jaguars and pumas sometimes kill livestock. Ranchers retaliate. That retaliation, she says, is one of the biggest reasons the animals disappear from areas they have lived in for generations. "So we track them, figure out where they actually move, and sit down with the people whose land they cross," she says. There is the restoration side, mapping and protecting the priority areas jaguars need to survive long-term. And there is the people side, working with rural women and youth.

"I started this as a woman in a field still mostly run by men, and part of what I care about is showing younger women and rural kids that this work is theirs to do too," she says.

The Cerrado, she says, is disappearing fast, "one of the most overlooked fronts of the climate crisis", and jaguars are one part of a much bigger story the team is trying to tell. "We can't keep telling it on a phone mic that picks up wind instead of words," she says.