Fauna Silvestrek

Diamond Dust

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 19.20.

Patagonia is transformed in the sunlight. From the moment I arrived, the whole territory has been shrouded in a dense fog ushered in by the snow, concealing much of the land behind a mysterious grey curtain. Today, at dawn, everything changed. Shadows into silhouettes. Mystery into majesty. I have never been more in love with this place than I was today.

And to think there were people online who advised against coming here in winter… I can only imagine they wanted to keep something this precious to themselves. Because I think I can say without a hint of hyperbole that Patagonia in the heart of winter is one of the most beautiful sights you will ever see.

This morning’s quest began where we left off yesterday, at the frozen field where Escarcha and her cubs had gone to ground. Tracks in the snow indicated that they had moved on during the night, but there was at least one puma still in the area: an adult female, one of the offspring of the legendary Rupestre, the former matriarch of Torres del Paine. It was still dark, but following the lurching silhouette of a sight that was becoming quite familiar still set my heart racing.

She seemed to be following the scent trail left behind on the cliff – either Escarcha and her cubs or another puma entirely – as she kept pausing at each overhang and doing the Flehmen response, a technique which allows cats to analyse the scents they detect in extreme detail, ascertaining information such as the age, health and sex of the scent-bearer. Cats are remarkably intelligent creatures and the puma – arguably the most successful of all the cats of the Americas, with more names than any other species of felid and a range spanning from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – is no exception to the rule.

The female took her leave and wandered off toward Lago Sarmiento, and we turned back in search of the new arrival from yesterday, NN, just as the sun began to crest the hills to the east, bathing everything in a golden halo. NN was where we left him yesterday, and while he popped out of his hiding place for a gnaw at his hidden kill, he promptly returned to the scrub and disappeared again.

Forging a new path, Fabián took us down a new route, past the frozen lake where we had found Lenga and Ñire yesterday and up into the foothills of Torres del Paine. We saw no pumas en route, but they had clearly been here during the night, with fresh prints along the road and across the fields beyond.

The guanacos, on the other hand, were everywhere. Apparently, in this corner of the world, only 4% of guanacos survive infancy, with the other 96% falling prey to the pumas. That figure alone goes a long way to explaining the concentration of pumas here in Tierra del Fuego – and also, the fecundity of the guanacos, since they still outnumber the pumas by at least ten to one. We didn’t get that classic “guanacos against the backdrop of the Torres” shot that Fabián was angling for, but the winter sunlight made for some breathtaking views of the guanacos on the eastern slopes.

Skittish beneath the mist, the guanacos seemed to lose a lot of their nervousness in the sunlight – perhaps because the increased visibility made them less anxious about being ripped apart by an unseen puma at any given moment. We were able to pass by so close that you could see the frost crystals on their ears.

The park’s meadowlarks were just as abundant today as they were yesterday, only this time they played second-fiddle to a natural phenomenon I have only ever heard about but never seen until now: diamond dust. A true polar experience, it is a kind of sub-zero “precipitation” that only forms under a cloudless sky: effectively, a ground-level cloud of ice crystals that seem to sparkle in the sunlight. I really should have filmed it, in retrospect, but some things never look as good on camera (though you can just about see it in the picture below). This was definitely one of those things. It was magical enough to behold, and something I’d recommend traveling all the way here to see in its own right.

Fabián drove on toward a small frozen forest of lenga trees in search of a chuncho – an Austral Pygmy Owl – that he knew to inhabit the area. I spotted it, but I think it’s safe to say he knew which tree it would be likely to be in, as any guide worth their salt would. After all, it happens to grow in a very iconic spot: right in front of the world-famous peaks of Torres del Paine.

Remarkably, the tiny little owl paid us no mind whatsoever, so I could get in so close I could see the yellow of its eyes without the help of my lens – which, of course, did a phenomenal job at close-range.

Back at Lago Sarmiento, a tip-off over the walkie-talkies alerted us to the return of Escarcha and her cubs, patrolling the edge of the lake. One guide and his group – the pike-square of supertelephoto users from yesterday – had jumped the fence and gone down to the lake and enjoyed ridiculously close views as the family passed them by, but at least Fabián and the other guides had the restraint not to insist we all go down to the shore and crowd the pumas. Instead we waited patiently and watched from a distance as Escarcha left her cubs in a safe spot and set out to go hunting.

That is not to say that we were not also treated to a close encounter. Escarcha’s route up into the hills took her right past us, passing mere feet away. Unfazed, she climbed up the snowy slope and disappeared into the descending clouds.

We waited for a while, suspecting from the approaching guanaco herd and the descending mist that she might have been hunting the herd, but Escarcha eventually appeared as if out of nowhere and went back down to hunt among the scrub by the lakeside, presumably for some smaller prey like hare. Fabián offered the choice to stay and pursue more pumas or to search for the other animal denizens of the park, and after some thought, I opted for the latter. After all, I did really want to see a ñandú. So we bade farewell to the others, who all remained with Escarcha and her cubs, and left the heart of puma country for Cerro Guido.

Like many of the places we have visited, Cerro Guido is a private ranch or estancia, but one of many that has realised that wildlife tourism can be tremendously more profitable than regular ranching. As such, a large part of the Cerro Guido ranch is given over to the local wildlife, giving the prairie-dwelling guanacos and rheas – and the puma that hunt them – a perfect haven of their own.

The ñandúes were very visible, albeit always in the middle distance, but the guanacos continued to make for good subjects against the afternoon light.

Another Patagonian mainstay was very much in evidence today: the South American Gray or Patagonian fox, a canid that is actually more closely related to coyotes and jackals than it is to the true foxes we know and love from back home. Just like they do in winter back in England, they were out looking for partners ahead of the mating season in spring, so we saw more than a dozen in all, sometimes alone, sometimes scampering about the fields in pairs. This one seemed to be limping, until we realised it was not walking with an odd gait but rather struggling with the depth of the snow, plunging up to its elbow every few steps.

The caiquén or upland goose was by far the most numerous resident of Cerro Guido, outnumbering even the ubiquitous guanacos. Caiquenes pair for life, though their fidelity is curiously one-sided: if the female dies, the heartbroken male will never pair off again, joining a bachelor group for the rest of his days, whereas if the male dies, the female will usually find a new mate within a few weeks. It’s a neat trick to ensure evolutionary stability in the long term, and – if you choose to look at it that way – a funny reflection of how men and women react to breakups.

I joked about the bus station-looking shelters, only to be told that yes, they really are paraderos – and to rub salt in the wound, a bus rounded the corner and passed us merely moments later. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the warmer months, when ranches like this one are more active, many ranch-hands travel to and from their posts this way. I caught myself wondering (and not for the first time since arriving) how amazing it would be to sack everything off and live here, way out here in the Chilean Antarctic wilderness. I’ve had madder dreams, trust me, and a little more careful thought would surely shake me out of my reverie. But I haven’t given it that much thought yet. It’s just a hunch I had – and a bottomless love for the wildest and most magnificent natural wonders of the world (and, coincidentally, places that style themselves as “the End of the World”).

We didn’t find any nearby ñandúes, and the two that had been relatively close but obscured by a bush on the way in had wandered far off by the time we turned about to make our way out. Not to be disappointed, though, Fabián spotted one near the road after we had left Cerro Guido and I jumped out to track it down.

I’ve not seen ostriches in the wild, or emus, or cassowaries, or any ratite for that matter. So I have no yardstick for truly bizarre appearance of this relatively huge flightless creature, which looks almost entirely out of place in the snowy scrubland of Patagonia. But, like the moa of New Zealand, ratites like the rhea are just as capable of adapting to cold conditions as their cousins in Africa are to the searing heat of the Namib and Sahara Deserts.

The ñandú or Lesser Rhea was brought to the attention of the world by the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, though it Charles Darwin and not the French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny who is more often associated with the bird. I could reel off more facts about rheas, but really I’d just like to see another and another. They’re remarkable creatures, even in a country full of healthy specimens of the incomparably beautiful puma.

But we still weren’t done. The road back to Puerto Natales passes by a great wall of stone, jutting out of the slope like the outer walls of some fortress. In Spain, a cliff face this vertical would be alive with griffons and known as a buitrera. Here in Puerto Natales, they’re known as condoreras. I don’t think I need to tell you what mighty creatures makes its home here.

I am, of course, talking about the largest bird of prey of all: the Andean condor. Unlike Colca Canyon in Peru, Patagonia (especially in winter) offers the chance to see these magnificent vultures at rest, where the whites of their wings can be much more easily appreciated. As the fog began to clear, we counted well over thirty of them. Fortunately, they’re scavengers to a fault, so there was nothing ominous at all about the fact that their numbers seem to grow exponentially every time we tried to count them.

Fabián joked about looking for a condor feather at the base of the cliff, which would almost certainly have turned up at least one. However, condor feathers are almost as sacred now as they were in the time of the Inca, albeit for less divine reasons: taking one out of the country is illegal, punishable by fines of up to an eye-watering $100,000. I adore vultures and have a collection of feathers I have found in my travels at home, but I’m not mad enough to chance that one.

The sun was beginning to set as we neared Puerto Natales, casting a final golden light over the slopes and the descending mist and turning the rest of the world a gentle shade of blue. There is a huge cave known as the Cueva del Milodón near here. I will try to book a trip out there for Thursday, as it is one of a handful of things to do in Puerto Natales that doesn’t require any high-grade trekking and expensive national park permits. I’ll give it some thought.

I had another serious urge to move here as I crossed town on the way back from the bank to my B&B. Forget the fact that it’s on the other side of the planet, in a place literally named the End of the World. There’s just something magical about this place. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen: like a frontier from the Old West frozen in time, surrounded by an array of animals so spectacular that you could live several lifetimes here and never get bored.

I wonder if they have a school that needs a languages teacher?

Enough musing. Another marathon read today. Sorry. Things will calm down a bit when I start my work placement in Santiago, I’m sure, but for now, every second is diamond dust and needs recording. I already miss this place and I haven’t even left yet. I’m only just halfway through my trip, for Pete’s sake.

One more day’s tracking awaits. Hopefully the weather (and our singularly good luck) holds out. BB x

Cat and Mouse

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Somewhere in deepest Patagonia. 17.00.

When I arrived in Puerto Natales last night, the first snows of winter had already covered the great plains of Patagonia in a thin layer of snow. The snow was still falling as I made my way into town and it was still coming down hard as I turned in for the night (at the ungodly hour of 9pm). So it’s hardly surprising that I woke to a total whiteout this morning. Patagonia looked into her winter wardrobe and put on her most beautiful dress of all.

Such were the conditions as Fabián, my guide for the next few days, picked me up and set off from the lamp-lit streets of Puerto Natales into the endless night.

I shopped around a lot before choosing Fabián of Fauna Silvestrek, largely because puma tracking in this corner of the world is not a budget-friendly experience. Touring with one of the English-language conglomerates can set you back thousands of dollars for just a couple of days. Traveling solo necessarily makes wildlife tourism an expensive operation, since you inevitably have to pay the same rate that a group would cover between three or four, so I was relieved when I found a Spanish-language option which looked much more personal, reliable and affordable. Tracking pumas is easier here than anywhere else in the world, but never guaranteed, so you want to be sure you’re investing in the right guy.

Fabián, it turns out, was exactly the right guy.

It’s a two hour drive from Puerto Natales to puma country, on the edge of PN Torres del Paine. In winter, it’s arguably easier to find pumas – or mountain lions, as they’re known in North America – outside the national park, where the elevation makes for a more unforgiving climate. Along the way you pass all sorts of signs you’ll find nowhere else, warning of collisions with pumas, guanacos, rheas and even armadillos. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for a ñandú – a Patagonian variant of the ostrich, and one of only a handful of words that start with the letter ñ – but we haven’t seen any yet. Maybe they’re keeping a low profile in the outer reaches of the park.

Today and tomorrow (and very probably the day after) are all about pumas. That’s what I came all the way down here for. And today did not disappoint.

We found our first cat hidden beneath the shelter of a bush not too far from the road. Fabián located it amidst the white wilderness with a thermal scope, which is a seriously useful piece of kit – especially when the whole world has frozen over. It was a youngster, unknown to the local guides, that had killed a guanaco recently. Puma kills are known around here as carneos, and are used by the trackers in their operations around the park, as each kill usually guarantees that the puma will stay in the immediate vicinity for the next three to four days, attracting other scavengers in the process.

This one – NN (No tiene Nombre) – stayed hidden in its shelter, being more wary of us than its more habituated kin in the park. So the best I could do was a digiscoped shot with Fabian’s scope. Even so, I was on tip-toes with excitement. One puma already, within minutes of arriving in puma country! Score!

The trackers communicate with each other via walkie-talkies. You can spot their cars a long way off by the antennae affixed to the roof, which allow them to talk to each other across the vast and signal-less distances of Patagonia. As such, when one tracker locates a puma, they will tip off the others.

Following one such tip-off, Fabián led me to a featureless deep (one of thousands) where a tracker and his clients had gathered, searching for a female puma and her cub which were still in the immediate vicinity. Just how immediate became apparent when I saw the back and the kinked tail of an adult mountain lion appear all of a sudden behind the scrub just a stone’s throw from the road. We stuck around for about an hour to try and locate them, but pumas are magical creatures. For a beast that can grow to a whopping 2.6m in length, they have a remarkable ability to disappear, even in a landscape covered in snow.

It wasn’t that cold, in spite of the snow, and a flock of meadowlarks kept us company in the meantime, twittering noisily among the deep footprints left behind by a previous company of trackers. The males are especially spectacular with their crimson chests. The brighter the red, the healthier the individual – so naturally, the more successful the male with the ladies. Ladies and gentleman: the gymbro of the bird world.

Nearby, a small herd of guanacos kept a wary eye on the spot where the pumas had disappeared. If the trackers don’t guide you to a puma, the guanacos just might. Their high-pitched alarm call is usually a good sign that the apex predator of Patagonia is somewhere nearby. Incidentally, guanacos complete the set: having seen alpacas, llamas and vicuñas in Peru, guanacos are the final member of the South American camelids.

These handsome beasts were once to be found across all of Chile, but hunting whittled their numbers to zero not long after the arrival of the first European settlers, and these days their range is restricted to the Cono Sur, with an outlying population in Peru.

We came across another herd further up the road, consisting of an alpha male and his three female attendants, with a fifth on lookout high up on the nearest hill. These vaulted the fence and came right past the car – or rather, the alpha managed just fine, while two of his followers looked on in confusion.

We came back to try our luck with the pumas from earlier, arriving in the very nick of time to see them leave the shelter of the scrub and strike out into the open.

This particular female is called Lenga, after a local kind of tree whose branches are distorted by the fierce Antarctic winds. Lenga’s tail is similarly misshapen, though nobody knows why. She appeared one day, as wandering pumas often do, with her oddly-shaped tail, and her attendant cub, Ñire.

We watched them cross the frozen lake and climb up into the snow-covered mattoral until they were mere shadows among the scrub before the snow clouds concealed them from sight. If that had been it for our encounter with the pumas, I’d have been quite content. But we were only getting started.

Another handsome resident of these windswept wastes is the crested caracara, known locally as the carancho (amazingly, a lot of the local birds and beasts seem to have preserved their precolonial names). Two of them were perched at the side of the road, quite unfazed by the four-wheel drive that ground to a halt right in front of them. Seeing how unafraid so many animals are in foreign corners of the world really makes one reflect on how violently we have treated the countryside in the UK for its creatures to be so innately terrified of us. Food for thought.

Arcing around a snowdrift and following the edge of Lago Sarmiento, the largest of the region’s lakes, we soon came across another group of tourists and their attendant tracker walking up the road, armed to the teeth with enough telephoto lenses to inspire envy in the World Cup press box. The reason for their almost religious procession was padding along a few metres ahead: an adult female puma, known as Escarcha (Frost), one of the park’s habituated mountain lions. We fell into line, marching for about half a kilometre before Fabian told me to press on while he went back for the car.

Cue a rather awkward incident where the tracker of the other group told me – in no uncertain words – to get lost. The implication was clear: I hadn’t paid for his services, so I shouldn’t be walking with his group. When Fabián caught up to me, another tracker working for the Others rounded on him, accosting him for tagging along “without so much as saying hello”. They were so busy chewing that one out that nobody seemed to notice that Escarcha’s calls had summoned two adorable cubs from the snow.

After a short distance, Escarcha and her cubs disappeared into the scrub. Team Territorial struck out onto a nearby hillside to get a better view, and we knew better than to follow them. Sure, from our spot on the road, we couldn’t tell whether they had the best seats in the house, but in the end it was the cubs who levelled the playing field. In their constant scampering about, up the hill and back down again, they made no attempt to stay hidden for long.

Like many cats, baby pumas are born with bright blue eyes that gradually turn a golden-brown after about six months, which helped to age these youngsters considerably – not yet a year old, but past the blue-eyed stage of infancy. The zoom lens could have told me that, but as it turns out, I hardly needed it: one of the cubs, more curious than its sibling, scampered up onto the road and sat watching us for a while. I don’t know what was going through its head, but it was clearly thinking.

Nearby, Escarcha kept a languid eye on her playful cubs. Habituated does not mean tame by any standards, and anybody with half a brain knows not to get too close to anything with lion in its name – and especially if it is a mother and her cubs. Even so, to see such an awesome predator at such a distance… I had no idea we would be so lucky on day one!

Soon, most of the trackers and their teams had arrived to try to deliver similar views of Escarcha and her cubs. However, being largely creatures of the night, they were to be disappointed: after that last bout of curiosity, Escarcha and her cubs disappeared into the snowy tangle of a mata scrub and never emerged, presumably falling into a deep and wintry sleep as the temperature dropped beyond.

Together with the other trackers, Fabián and I were on stakeout for the rest of the afternoon, but to no avail. The meadowlarks were keen to point out the presence of the pumas by flocking around their chosen scrub and twittering noisily, before a ghostly cinereous harrier drove them all up into the air.

After vultures, harriers are probably some of my favourite creatures in the animal kingdom, The way they seem to float as they silently quarter their territories, traveling in ever-widening circles… together with the silvery grey colour of the males… they’re all kinds of magnificent. Words can’t even.

Shortly before six, with the light beginning to fail, Fabián signalled it was time to head for home. Chances are we may well run into Escarcha again tomorrow. Just as well: I was shaking something awful out there. One accustoms to the cold, of course, but those first few minutes after leaving the warmth of the car are definitely the worst as the body acclimatises. I must have looked like I had the ague – which would have rendered any attempts to take a steady photograph in the fading light almost impossible!

The return journey back to Puerto Natales was a lot more scenic than the journey up this morning, if only because the clouds had begun to break apart, defogging the world below. Where before all had been ghostly white, some mysterious deity had revealed a breathtaking landscape of sheer cliffs, towering mountains and grey lakes. It was already getting dark, so hopefully tomorrow (when the weather is forecast to be clearer) will produce some better landscape results. For now, I want to remember this view: yellow grass in the snow against a hopeful yellowing sky.

I got through today’s expedition on the restorative power of six cocktail-sized chorizo bites and a Starbucks caramel waffle, so I was a little peckish by the time we got back to base. On a tip-off from Fabián, I dropped in on Artimaña, a quirky restaurant in the centre of town. And what a find! Like a lot of the local establishments, it had a condor feather nailed to the wall (this seems to be a local tradition of some sort), but the food was incredible, all of it locally sourced and rustled up on command. Friendliest staff ever, too. I’ll have to come back here again – more than once before I leave, I’d wager. I don’t usually click with a place this quick, but there’s something Artimaña gets right in one hit. It might be the condor feather, of course, but I’d think I’m a bit more subtle than that.

Mammoth post – it’s not often I have so much to record. But today really was a red letter day, and I have to get this all down before I forget.

Tomorrow, Round II: pumas, and – with any luck – the enigmatic ñandú. Topping today’s ridiculous success rate will be hard, but I am as insufferably full of hope as I have ever been, supercharged by a full twenty-four hours in a frozen paradise. Fingers crossed! BB x