Focus Tours started in 1981, in Belo Horizonte MG, Brazil. Owner Douglas Trent had just returned from the Amazon, where he witnessed the very beginning of deforestation. He started this company to use as a tool to help get people out of poverty and preserve nature. Focus Tours was the only professionally run nature tour business in Brazil for the first 20 or so years of its existence, and he opera
ted tours and/or co-guided trips for most of the world's nature and birding companies, including Field Guides, International Expeditions, Ornitholidays, Questers, and others, as well as doing films and documentaries for BBC Wildlife, Arte France, Redaktion Tiere & Natur, Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures, Travel Quest and more. Focus Tours success enabled Douglas to raise significant funds for conservation and community development. Our largest project to date started with Lerinho Arruda de Falcao, a Pantanerio living alongside the newly opened Tranpantaneira road. After years of friendship, Lerinho showed Douglas a jaguar tooth, from the last one he had killed. A month later, Lerinho gathered about 30 family members, and when I arrived, told him he had proven hisself to be a true friend of the Pantaneiro community. He gave Douglas that tooth, and Douglas accepted the invitation to be part of his family. Douglas then offered an exchange...it they stopped killing jaguars, he would help the family get into the nature tourism business, showing people jaguars. This started with Lerinho putting 1,000 hectares of his land into conservation, creating the RPPN Jaguar Ecological Reserve. Douglas had already founded the American NGO, Focus Conservation Fund, and was able to raise money with the assistance of Joanne Devlin, to pay him well above the going price per hectare, to award him for setting up his privately owned reserve, still in the family name. Douglas was able to prepay room nights for the next year far in advance, giving them time to build the first real ecolodge in the Pantanal. This provided a place for English teachers to stay, and they taught his children and others English. Once they could communicate well with clients, Focus Tours took them on as guides in training. In 2005 Douglas told them that to be really successful, they need to go on their own, and he moved his conservation efforts, and tours, to the Caceres MT region, on the Paraguay River. Even today Douglas guides the trips, combined with research to establish baseline populations for birds, jaguars, otters, etc. By 2015, the project that started with Lerinho long ago, had grown and involved others and today is reported to sustain some 50 Pantaneira families. Focus Tours remains a substantial force for conservation and community development, having started this long before the concept of ecotourism was established. When you travel with Focus Tours, you are helping to contribute to our work to make a better world.
