Chasing wolves is not usually in the job description of an HSBC Bank of Bermuda employee, but for ten days in November that?s exactly what Diana Antonition did ? on company time.

Mrs. Antonition, credit card department office administrator, is the latest HSBC staff member to join the HSBC Employee Environmental Fellowship programme in partnership with Earthwatch.

Only a few HSBC employees each year are picked to become environmental volunteers with different research projects around the world. To go on the programme prospective candidates must complete an extensive application process, and are actually picked by Earthwatch rather than the bank. Many of those picked can demonstrate a prior interest in nature.

?I am naturally involved anyway with a lot of stuff in Bermuda,? said Mrs. Antonition. ?I am on the environment committee with the Bermuda National Trust, Save Open Spaces, and I have also done my own monarch butterfly project.?

Naturally, Mrs. Antonition expected to be sent somewhere to study butterflies, but instead she received a radically different assignment ? wolves and jaguars.

?When I got my notice that I was going to Brazil to study jaguars I thought, okay ? this is something totally different from what I expected.?

Mrs. Antonition was sent to the Emas National Park in the Brazilian Cerrado (savannah) in the central west Brazilian plateau. The Cerrado is critically endangered due to its conversion into agriculture and beef cattle lands. Mrs. Antonition joined a research project led by Leandro Silveira, president of the Jaguar Conservation Fund, who is primarily studying carnivores such as jaguars and maned wolves.

?The jaguars are very, very elusive,? said Mrs. Antonition. ?The people there hardly ever see them. One of the veterinarians who was with us had been there for four years and had only seen two jaguars.?

That is why volunteers were told right away not to expect to see a real jaguar.

?You see tracks everywhere,? she said. ?You know they are there because of the kills and their tracks are everywhere. But they are more in the central part of the park.?

Therefore, the work of Mrs. Antonition?s volunteer group tended to focus on the maned wolf who are a less modest species. Maned wolves look a little like red foxes on stilts. They are called ?maned? because of fur that sticks up on the back of their necks.

Part of Mrs. Antonition?s work was to help bait wolf traps with live pigeons, check the traps, move them, and then help sedate and analyse captured wolves. Checking traps could take anywhere from a morning or the entire day.

?The emotions that you go through when you see your first wolf?,? said Mrs. Antonition. ?I couldn?t take any photographs of the first wolf we caught. The next day when we got another one I got used to it.?

It was a first-time capture for the group?s first wolf, which meant that they got to name her.

Mrs. Antonition named her Rachael after her daughter. Mrs. Antonition has the frequency numbers for Rachael?s radio collar and can contact the research centre at any time and find out how Rachael is doing.

Wolves caught in the trap had to be tranquillised. The wolves were weighed and measured, blood was taken for DNA testing, and they were checked over for parasites and disease. First-time captures also had a collar with a radio transmitter placed around their necks.

?The chance of handling the animals was amazing,? she said. ?We learning about radio telemetry which is used to track the collared animals. You are making a difference. That was a big thing. Every animal we caught, every bit of information we collected went into the database. It is going to make a difference.?

Sometimes the wolves acted more like Wile E. Coyote, and figured out how to make the project work to their more immediate benefit.

?We had one wolf, Catarino, who we captured four times because he was trap happy,? said Mrs. Antonition. ?He knew the traps and knew they meant a meal because the traps had pigeons in them. Catarino would just sit there, put his hind quarters out to get jabbed, and knew he would be released.?

Although Mrs. Antonition didn?t actually see any jaguars, she did help with jaguar research.

She helped with the care and training of founds the scientists use to track down and tree jaguars. While hunting jaguars, the dogs are tied in pairs.

?They never let the dogs hunt singly, because a jaguar will kill a single dog,? said Mrs. Antonition. ?And the dog trainer never goes out with less than eight dogs.

?They also have to learn how to swim together. Jaguars don?t just stay on land. They will go in the river to go across and get up a tree.

?So the trainer takes them swimming. They have to learn to swim as pairs and work as a team.?

The dogs are trained to tree the jaguar and then back off. The scientist then shoots the jaguar with a tranquillising dart. The suddenly sleepy jaguar comes out of the tree and goes into the brush to fall asleep.

?The dogs will pick up the scent again,? she said. ? The dogs will not attack a jaguar if it is down. The trainer calls it back and the scientists analyse the animal.?

Collaring and tracking the jaguars in the area is important, because local farmers sometimes accuse the jaguars of eating their livestock. They then use this excuse to hunt the jaguar.

If scientists can come up with an alibi for the jaguar, the animal can be exonerated.

One of the more unpleasant tasks that Mrs. Antonition and her group were given was studying the rotting carcass of a tapir, one of the jaguar?s favourite foods.

?There was a tapir near our research station that was killed by a truck,? said Mrs. Antonition. The whole 12 days we were there it didn?t move and we had to analyse how it rotted.

?So every morning we woke up to the stench of this dead tapir.?

Mrs. Antonition was in Brazil during the winter, which was the rainy season.

?It rained everyday, and I mean rain,? she said. ?Some days, it rained all day and other days it was beautiful in the morning and you could see this mushroom cloud coming across the flatlands. One day I thought I was in a hurricane, but the storm only lasted a few minutes. We wore hiking boots, but we got dirty because it is this red, red clay.?

Mrs. Antonition said, although she was away from the office, it was not a vacation. She actually had to work very, very hard and was sometimes up for 24 hours.

?I wouldn?t say it is for everyone,? she said ?You have to accept the working conditions. You are out in the rain. You get soaking wet and muddy. You are dealing with live animals.

?You had to be fit. Sometimes we had to walk through all this grass and trees for two or four kilometres to find the animal,? she said. ?I do a lot of walking and I do horse back riding.?

To prepare for the trip she increased her usual walking routine.

?It was a fantastic experience,? she said.

One aspect of the programme is that participants receive a small grant to put toward an environmental project in their own country when they return how.

Mrs. Antonition plans to use the money to continue her butterfly work.

?I am probably going to be working with Mount St. Agnes, because that is where my kids go to school,? she said. ?I am going to go in, use some of the funding to buy some of the pots and potting mix. I already have some of the seeds. That way it involves the children. We have to start young.?