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Focus on Brazil


Brazil is a vast country with several distinctly different biomes. Discover them all with Focus Tours: Brazil

Focus on Argentina

The 8th largest country in the world, Argentina offers a wealth of experiences. From the subtropical rain forests of Iguazú Falls to the high Andes. Discover more with Focus Tours: Argentina 

Focus on Bolivia

Bolivia, nestled between Brazil, Peru, Chile and Paraguay, is the poorest and least developed country in South America, but also biologically and culturally the richest, safest and friendliest. Discover more with Focus Tours: Bolivia

Focus on Chile

Chile is the only truly temperate country in the Neotropics, and occupies more degrees of latitude than any other nation worldwide. Perhaps it is not surprising that Chile offers several extremes of the natural world. Discover more with Focus Tours: Chile

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Jaguar Tours

The northern Pantanal is the richest area in the world for spotting Jaguars in the wild and, our naturalist guides are some of the best. Together with our boatmen thye will take you into the best areas for jaguars and many other creatures. Read more about Jaguar Tours.

Bird Watching Tours

Douglas Trent is a scientist, bird watcher and wildlife photographer and his be operating Bird Watcing Tours for around two decades now. The tour possibilities in South America are many. Read more about Bird Watching Tours.

Wildlife Photography Tours

Douglas Trent is a wildlife photographer and guides groups of professional, or enthusiastc amateur, photographers and film crews on focused wildlife tours. Read more about Wildlife Photography Tours 

Funding Conservation

 

A percentage of our profits has been funding in-country conservation projects since 1981. They directly benefit the local communities we visit and, when possible, are self-sustable, generating benefits long after our initial donation. Your visit will benefit you, the environment and your hosts.

 

The Evolution of an Ecotour Operator    

Thank you for visiting the Focus Tours website!  If you have visited us before, you may note the changes.

As an ecologist from Kansas University, and one of the founders of the rainforest conservation movement, I started Focus Tours in Brazil in 1981.  Since then, we have offered high quality nature, birding and photography tours, using some of the profits for our goals of getting people out of poverty and preserving nature.  We are among the first real ecotour companies, not getting into this business so much to be a big nature tour operator, but rather to make a difference in this world with the funds raised through such tours.

With our work in getting a Brazilian jaguar hunter’s family into the business of showing tourists jaguars instead of killing them, we set a precedent for what a tour company and its clients, can do to preserve nature.  This led to consulting work in a number of African countries, as well as speaking in conferences about this work around the world.

 

 

This has now led to developing projects in partnership with the Brazilian government, academic institutions and other stakeholders.  In particular, I am now directing the Wildlife of the Pantanal Project (Bichos do Pantanal), funded by the Fundação Petrobras Ambiental, and other sponsors.  This project is to establish the baseline population of jaguars, giant and neotropical otters, hyacinth macaws, and other rare or endangered wildlife in the Pantanal on the Paraguay River.  In Cáceres MT, the project will work with the 73 schools, bring nature into the curriculums, training disadvantaged people to be naturalist guides, and having boats to take school kids into their Pantanal, to learn about their nature.  We invite you to visit this project and assist with the fauna surveys, and will soon have a project site.

Focus Tours can also help set up guided nature trips to locally owned lodges in the Pantanal on the Transpantaneira, with guides we have trained, and to a lodge in the Amazon that is doing excellent work with local communities.  With a project in Minas Gerais, in southeast Brazil, we can offer 10 of the state parks, with which we have a contract with the Sec. of the Environment, to do the fauna surveys, train locals to be guides and to work with the schools and community development.  We can also take you to see the rare and beautiful Golden Lion Tamarin, near Rio de Janeiro

We offer you high quality tours in these and a few other regions, where your participation will help preserve the region’s biodiversity, and provide for local economies. 

Thank you!

 

Douglas B. Trent