When the wolves showed up, not a single dog dared to show its tail. It was 7:30 pm, and night had fallen over the Caraça Sanctuary, a neo-Gothic building nestled in the heart of the state of Minas Gerais. Suddenly, a reddish silhouette with a black snout and impossibly long legs emerged on the forecourt. With a ghostly gait, the imposing animal advanced and devoured a plate of food under the watchful eyes of fascinated yet uneasy tourists. The lobo-guará ("maned wolf" in English), the largest canid in South America, left no one indifferent.
In this monastery, formerly a Catholic middle school founded in the 18th century, the Lazarist priests have made a habit of feeding the lobo-guará every day since the 1980s. This offers passing visitors the chance to see this large predator with its tawny mane emerge from the darkness up close. Nicknamed "Zico," the evening prowler is a 6-year-old male, weighing in at 30 kilos and standing nearly 1 meter at the withers.
In total, six members of this species (four adults and two pups) are believed to live on the territory of the Caraça Sanctuary, a place of worship but above all an ecological reserve covering 12,000 hectares, with peaks rising over 2,000 meters in altitude. "It is a strictly preserved area, home to several river sources, where three different ecosystems meet, including that of the Cerrado," said Bernardo Borba Carneiro, a 42-year-old biologist at Caraça.
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