Emas National Park

Listen first. A steady wind moves across open grass. A dry rustle rises from the stems, and somewhere far off a bird calls in a loud, cackling rhythm. The ground under your feet is reddish and fine, and it gets onto your boots and the hem of your trousers. Above you the sky looks enormous. The horizon is flat and unbroken in almost every direction. This is Emas National Park, on the high plateau above Chapadão do Céu, in the Brazilian state of Goiás.

The name comes from a bird. In Portuguese, an ema is a rhea. The rhea is a large, flightless bird of South America, a distant cousin of the ostrich and the emu. It is grey-brown, long-necked, and surprisingly fast on open ground. Out here you may see one striding through the grass, its head held high above the stems. Rheas do well in landscapes like this one, wide and open, with long sightlines, where a tall bird can see trouble coming from a long way off.

The landscape around you is called the Cerrado. It is the vast tropical savanna of central Brazil. It covers a huge part of the country, and scientists count it among the most species-rich savannas on Earth. Many visitors arrive expecting rainforest, but the Cerrado is something different. Here you find grasslands, scattered twisted trees, and pockets of denser woodland along the streams. In this park the open grassland dominates — the habitat ecologists call campo limpo, which simply means clean field.

The park was created in 1961. In 2001, UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site, together with Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, further north and east in Goiás. The two sites share one listing, the Cerrado Protected Areas. UNESCO recognised them as some of the best remaining examples of this savanna. That recognition matters, because the Cerrado has lost an enormous share of its natural vegetation to farming over recent decades.

You can see that pressure from the park boundary itself. Drive in, and you will likely pass endless fields of soy, maize, and cotton. The farmland runs right up to the edge of the protected area. Inside the line, the native grassland continues. From the air, the park appears as a large island of wild savanna in a sea of agriculture. This contrast is one of the most striking things about the place. It shows, in a single view, what the region looked like before, and what it has largely become.

Now for the animals. This park is one of the better places in Brazil to look for some of the Cerrado's large mammals. The giant anteater lives here, a shaggy grey animal with a long tube of a snout and a bushy, flag-like tail. The maned wolf lives here too. It is not really a wolf. It is a tall, red, long-legged canid that looks like a fox on stilts, and it eats fruit as well as small animals. Pampas deer graze the open plains, often in small groups.

The birds are just as remarkable. That loud cackling call you may have heard belongs to the red-legged seriema, a long-legged grassland bird that hunts snakes and lizards on foot. Blue-and-yellow macaws nest in dead palm trunks in some parts of the park, and their harsh calls carry far across the plain. Watch the skies for birds of prey hunting over the grass. Of course, wild animals keep their own schedule. Patience and a good guide make a large difference here.

Here is the first surprise most visitors never expect. Look at the earth mounds scattered across the grassland. Some are knee-high, and some are much taller. They are termite mounds, built from hardened soil. On certain warm, humid nights early in the rainy season, many of these mounds begin to glow. Tiny points of greenish light cover their surfaces, like a cluster of stars sitting on the ground.

The light does not come from the termites. It comes from the larvae of a click beetle that lives inside the walls of the mound. Each larva sits in a small tunnel with its head near the opening, and it gives off a cold, steady glow. Flying insects come towards the light, and the larva catches them. The glowing mounds of this park are among the best-known places in the world to see this effect. Researchers and photographers travel here specifically for it, and it depends heavily on weather and season.

The second surprise is fire. In the Cerrado, fire is not only a disaster. Many plants here have adapted to it over a very long time. Some trees have thick, corky bark that protects them from heat. Some grasses send up new green shoots within days after a burn. Still, large wildfires in the dry season have damaged the park badly in the past. Park managers maintain firebreaks, long strips of cleared or burned land, to stop single fires from sweeping across the whole plateau.

Water shapes this place too. The plateau is high ground, and streams begin here and run outwards into the wider basins of central Brazil. Along these watercourses the vegetation changes. You find taller trees, gallery forest, and stands of buriti palms, a tall fan palm that grows in wet soil. In the Cerrado, a line of buriti palms usually tells you that water lies close to the surface. Wildlife often gathers near these green ribbons, especially in the dry months.

The seasons change the experience completely. In the dry season the grass turns golden and brittle, the air fills with fine dust, and animals are often easier to spot in the open. In the rainy season the plain turns green, flowers appear, the sky builds great towers of cloud, and the termite mounds may light up after dark. The roads are mostly unpaved, and visits usually take place with a local guide and a vehicle. That suits the scale of the park, which covers well over one thousand square kilometres.

So, take a moment where you stand. Feel the wind coming across the plain without anything to stop it. Notice the colour of the soil, the mounds standing in the grass, the shape of a twisted tree against the sky. As you leave, watch the boundary where the wild grassland meets the farm fields. Keep an eye on the roadside, too — a rhea, a deer, or a maned wolf may still be watching you go.