Rooting for peccaries.

• Author: Cohn, Jeffrey P.
• Position: The endangered Chacoan peccaries

Although these piglike animals are common from Argentina to the U.S. Southwest, the largest of their species is threatened with extinction in the Gran Chaco

Mid-morning and the heat of Bolivia's Gran Chaco was beginning to get to wildlife biologist Andrew Taber. The temperature in the hot, dry desert and thornbush region had already hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit and was still climbing. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Taber peered from under a bottle tree, eyes searching through the vibrating haze for his elusive quarry.

Suddenly, something ahead moved. Four shaggy animals with large heads, white collars around their necks, and long, bristly hairs on their backs emerged from the desert scrub. The animals Taber would later dub "the pigs from green hell" crossed a road in front of him single file and almost as suddenly disappeared into the vegetation on the other side.

After five months of searching in vain, Taber, Bolivia program officer for the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, had spotted the object of his pursuit a herd of Chacoan peccaries. Found only in the Gran Chaco of southeastern Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Paraguay, Chacoans - called tagua in Paraguay, quimilero in Argentina, and chancho solitario or jabali in Bolivia - are the rarest of the three peccary species native to the Americas.

Listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Chacoan peccaries were once thought extinct by scientists. "It took the scientific community a long time to find out what the local people knew all along," says John Mayer, a wildlife biologist with Westinghouse in the United States who participated as a graduate student in a Chacoan peccary research project in Paraguay that rediscovered the animals in the 1970s.

However, many scientists and conservationists worry that further development of the Chaco will threaten the continued survival of the Chacoan peccary. Habitat loss, a restricted range, and overhunting have caused Chacoan peccary numbers to plummet. Although no good population surveys exist, Taber estimates only about five thousand remain. "They have disappeared from huge tracts where they were once abundant," he says. Fortunately, in 1995 the 8.5-million-acre Kaa-Iya National Park, also called the Gran Chaco National Park, was established in southeastern Bolivia along the Paraguayan border. Offering new hope for the Chacoan peccary, Kaa-Iya, in Guarani, means "spirit masters of the forest."

Elsewhere, destruction of Latin America's rain forests poses a similar if lesser danger for the more widespread white-lipped and collared peccaries. "They are disappearing quickly in Central America," reports Eduardo Carrillo, a professor at Costa Rica's National University in San Jose. "Even in places where peccaries were once common they are now less so."

Peccaries are piglike animals native only to the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the Chacoan peccary, there is the white-lipped peccary, which lives mostly in dense rain forests from southern Mexico to northern Argentina, and...