Life sometimes takes you by surprise and so the Animal Kingdom does. Because it is nothing but surprising to capture on camera one of Amazon forest’s highly elusive residents.
While the sights of the Amazon jungle dog are extremely rare, video footages of this short-eared dog are even rarer. Very shy and always seeking to stay as far as possible of any human sight, these animals were even thought to be extinct. But surprisingly, a conservation biologist got all the luck in the world as his camera accidentally filmed this extremely elusive creature.
Lary Reeves was leading an expedition through the Amazon rain forest in southeastern Peru when accidentally captured on camera the elusive jungle dog near the Tambopata Research Center. The biologist decided to set up a GoPro camera with the hope of recording some king vulture. However, when he later checked the recorded footage, he just could not believed his eyes.
“The dog came by about 20 minutes after we left,” Lary Reeves, a University of Florida graduate student shared with National Geographic. “That was crazy.”
Even extremely short, the encounter is fascinating, because these animals are just very elusive, but they’re also blending in extremely well. The dark coloring coat helps them to stay camouflaged to avoid predators. “They are very timid,” ecologist Renata Leite Pitman who’s been studying short-eared dogs for years said. “hey are rare and hard to see.”
About the size of a fox, but unrelated neither to foxes nor wolves, it is very little known about this species. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the species as “Data Deficient” due to the extremely rare sightings.
Watch the rare footage here:
