A Tale of Seven Pumas: Numbers 4-6

After the previous day, we were slightly dreading another day of howling gales, low temperatures, and not much puma. But at 4am we headed out to Estancia Laguna Amarga again, down the mountain in the dark. The compensation for the early start is a spectacular sunrise, like this one photographed by my friend Kerstin:

And today, after less than an hour, Angelo our tracker radioed us from quite nearby. With a huge grin, he pointed: there, spread out before us, as if on a stage, were four pumas and one dead guanaco (right foreground). So of course there we stayed, four and a half hours, riveted.

It was a mother, known as Petaca which rudely means “Shorty”, and two 11-month old cubs , one male and one female. (The fourth puma was a young adult female, who will be the subject of my next and final puma post.)

Angelo had seen Petaca the previous evening, looking as though she was hunting, so he had gone searching for her again this morning. She had indeed killed, an adult guanaco, and when we arrived the male cub was still feeding:

but they were clearly sated,

and beginning to nap:

The kill would last them 2-3 days, so long as the condors didn’t find it, so they were scraping up clumps of grass to camouflage it from above:

Here’s a video:

It looked for all the world like a leg of lamb à la Provencale, ready for the oven.

Thankyou, Angelo (the one with the beard!).

I’m ending this post with a small gallery of photos as they move through the landscape finding good spots to rest in for a while. You can I hope see how the wind whips through the grasses, and how their muscles ripple beneath the skin.