But the rangers had already made a difference. They had established government presence in a region where anything goes. Thanks to their presence in San Martín, in November they had been invited to march in the annual parade celebrating the cuadrillas. Mr. Zorro thought the invitation was a turning point for the park, a moment of acceptance. And during their motorcycle patrols through Manacacías, the rangers had recorded some notable wildlife sightings.
Gustavo Castro, one of the rangers who had remained at the ranch that week, had been on lookout a few months earlier when he noticed something brown and furry wandering through the tall grass. “I got closer to him, maybe five or six meters, and he continued normally,” Castro said. “I managed to get some good videos and photos.” The animal was a bush dog, a wild dog believed to be extinct in the area.
For Dr. Walschburger, the confirmed sighting of a wild dog was exciting. Wild dogs were more common in the Amazon, suggesting that the wild corridor between Manacacías and the Amazon basin was active. Documented use of the area by wild dogs could potentially result in stronger protection for that corridor, which looked, on a satellite map, like a curved finger of green stretching southeast. The more data that comes from the park, Dr. Walschburger said, the greater the possibilities for conservation in and around it.
The llanos can be disorienting – the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who explored the Orinoco region in the 1800s, complained of their “infinite monotony” – but after months of patrolling, the new rangers traversed the terrain with ease. Their phones were now filled with oncillas, tapirs, great horned owls and the glittering palm crowns of Mauritius at sunset.
Oscar Rey joined his colleagues as they stopped at a bend in the Manacacías River. Rangers often monitored this sandy shoreline, as people routinely set fishing nets on it. Mr. Rey has known this since he was a boy, when his grandfather taught him to drag his feet while he walked barefoot in the water to avoid being stung by rays.
Everywhere around him were tracks left by tapirs, peccaries, capybaras and lizards. It was almost the time of year when freshwater turtles were digging nests on riverbanks, he said. Mr. Rey’s grandparents ate their eggs, of course, but future generations did not.