A maned wolf was seen walking around on a farm near sheep and cow farms in the Cassorotiba neighborhood, in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, last Sunday (11). According to the Municipality of Maricá, this is the first time that the species has been seen in the entire coastal zone of the Metropolitan Region of Rio.
Rural producer Marcelo Nahoum, 47, recorded a video about 50 meters away, which shows the animal hunting and feeding on small birds in a forested area of the property. The man noticed that there was something different about the farm and initially thought that there was a predator, as the animals were scared.
“The herd did not reduce, but the animals were scared. That’s when I saw the wolf eating a cavy. I ran to get my cell phone and started filming. He was calm, as if he already knew the terrain and then disappeared. It was a big surprise and I’m very happy to have done this act”, said Marcelo Nahoum.
With the act, the Secretary of Sustainable City of Maricá included the region in the Fauna Monitoring Program and will start to monitor the animal by cameras, as is already the case with the puma, wild dogs and coatis, which have already been seen in an environmental preservation area in the Espraiado neighborhood.
Guara wolf
The mammal researcher at the Maricá Fauna Monitoring Program, Izar Aximoff, said that there is no record of maned wolf attacks on humans, but that people should avoid approaching them and also should not feed the animals.
“We are going to monitor the region with cameras to see if there is enough food or if there are other animals of the species. We have been monitoring the records of this species in the state of Rio since 2014. It is the largest canid in the Americas and it is a great happiness that it appeared in Maricá”, said the researcher.
The maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), according to an assessment by the Ministry of the Environment and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), is considered an animal that lives in a vulnerable situation for extinction.
It feeds on small animals, such as rodents and armadillos, in addition to various fruits from the Cerrado, and has a total population estimated at more than 23,000 animals, 21,000 of which in Brazil. It is precisely in the country where there is the largest population that the animal is at risk of disappearing. There are records of the presence of the maned wolf in Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.
Source: CNN Brasil
