Nine years ago science writer, film producer, and former Field Museum exhibit designer Vic Banks took a break from Chicago. He visited and fell in love with a place that sounds a bit like the rural midwest: a flat, sunny grassland disdained by east-coast sophisticates. But this landscape–the Pantanal–is in semitropical southwestern Brazil. And it is still lush with a quantity and variety of wildlife long gone from our part of the world.
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Among his other surprises: chasing a fast-moving teju lizard away from a host’s chickens, seeing 30 snail kites at once (“just finding one in the Everglades is a life experience”), photographing a row of caimans feeding in the rapids beneath a waterfall, flying low over an enormous rookery of perhaps 10,000 American wood storks, and finding dozens of his favorite Pantanal creature, the striking blue hyacinth macaw. “Like the Pantanal itself, it’s the largest of its kind, very threatened, and poorly understood.”
from pollution by agricultural chemicals (some of them banned in the U.S.)
A combination party, environmental fund-raiser, book signing, and silent auction–hosted by Bill Kurtis of Channel Two–will feature Banks and his photographs of the Pantanal, along with Brazilian music and hors d’oeuvres, from 7 to 11 Friday, February 21, at Ancient Echoes, 1800 N. Clybourn. Admission is free, but the food, T-shirts, signed copies of the book, raffle tickets, psychic readings, and lambada lessons are extra. Call 337-7733.
