Author: myip2014

In 2010, on the shores of Bahía Inútil (Useless Bay!) on the Straits of Magellan in Tierra del Fuego, king penguins established a new colony, now numbering about 60 birds. (For comparison, many of the more established colonies, all on tiny islands, have 100,000 birds!)

This map shows all known King Penguin colonies, in red, and this new one, in yellow

It is a very unusual breeding colony because unlike most other colonies, whose residents travel long distances from tiny islands to forage, these birds forage only locally in the Magellan Strait. This second map shows where these penguins forage; the yellow star is their colony. It is the only colony in the world reachable by car.

The convenience of this local food shopping should help them feed their chicks more efficiently, but the chick mortality rate is quite high, perhaps due to either predators like gray foxes, or diseases like bird flu?

Here is the new community. The Straits are behind them, and they are sheltered by the intervening dunes:

An adult is up to 1m (39″) high, and weighs up to 18Kg (40lbs). That’s about 75% of the size of an emperor penguin. Look at the interacting pairs, stretching themselves tall.

They are most probably courting, since it is breeding season.

They are serially monogamous, keeping the same mate all year, but not necessarily the next. These two seem to have bonded:

Some are undecided:

He seems to have rejected both of them:

Some are apparently fending off competitors:

And some may sadly be destined for a solitary life:

But for those who succeed, one year later you become the proud parents of a teenager:

This is last year’s chick, and it will soon shed its down and head out to sea. Meanwhile, only its mother could love it.

PS: All maps are from argos.com, the high tech company that helped tag and track the penguins for a study by Pütz et al 2021.

A new king penguin colony in Magellan Strait?

After Chiloé and the lake district, we flew south to Punta Arenas, in southern Patagonia. First stop, Tierra del Fuego. My husband, who did not come on this trip, was impressed more than anything else by the fact that we crossed the Straits of Magellan to get there. Here is a map, showing where we crossed, at the narrowest point of the straits, 1.2 miles wide:

This 350 mile long passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was discovered by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, and, hinting at its fearsome reputation, it was pretty rough; we were ordered off the top deck!

The part of Tierra del Fuego we were in is a treeless and fairly flat area, though it does have guanaco!

The vegetation looked mostly unpromising, except for patches of color:

But once you got close, it was fascinating. Many were cushion plants, thriving below the fury of the relentless winds, mounds of tiny Alpine-like succulentish things, with other plants pushing up through the middle:

Here are a few of my favorites:

Some plants were a little larger:

We didn’t see many birds, but this flamboyant guy and his much subtler mate made up for it:

And nestled by the side of a road, very well camouflaged, a couple of Lesser Horned Owls.

Our end goal was the King Penguin colony, of which more in my next post.

This is an extra mini-post, that I had intended to be part of my last one. That last post was my 500th since I started in 2017, and in celebration I have a story to tell.

Last summer I bought a small folding aluminum stool, which I kept by my beaver pond. One day it disappeared. I searched the shore thoroughly, no sign of it. I was mystified: only the animals and I go there.

Two days before Christmas, the pond now thinly frozen except for the otter holes, about 8 feet out on the ice from where I’d last seen my stool, there it was:

The only explanation I can come up with is that the otters pulled it out of the pond onto the ice, either because the shiny blue metal looked like a fish, or just for fun.

As for how it got into the pond the first place…….

By turns magnificent and comic, the Peruvian Pelican, Pelecanus thagus, is one of three New World pelican species. It breeds along the coast of Peru and Chile. Chiloé is the extreme south of its non-breeding range, and populations there are increasing, though not yet breeding.

These are huge birds, with wingspans well over 2m (78in). They live only on the coasts, and eat mainly Peruvian Anchovies, often heading out to fish at night. But they can eat other things: well-grown chicks have been know to eat smaller (unrelated!) ones.  They seem to be sociable birds, usually in small groups, like these ones preening and drying their wings.

They mingle with other birds, such as gulls, Kelp Geese, Magellanic Penguins, steamer ducks (back left below), and cormorants.

These gulls are fighting over a fish, while the pelicans stand by, aloof and patrician.

The red bill and blue gular pouch are quite distinctive:*

This one was heading out to sea, taking a running jump:

For the photographer, they’re a gift. Even from a bobbing boat you can take their portraits.

PS They have been in this part of the world for a long time, and were represented in rock art in northern Chile between 1,700 BC and 1,000 AD. Overall populations have been adversely affected by El Niño fluctuations, and a reduction in food stocks, especially anchovies. The IUCN classifies it as Near Threatened.

* A favorite children’s book comes to mind, Roald Dahl’s The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me, in which the pelican’s gular pouch carries the water for the monkey’s window-washing business:

Chiloé is a large island off the coast of Chile, near the Lake Region. It has a climate rather like that of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State: its west coast and uplands get a torrential 120″ inches of rain a year. We walked in the mossy Valdivian temperate rain forests, stayed in lovely lodges in two of the national parks, and went out on rivers, estuaries, and the Pacific ocean.

We had hoped to see a variety of small rare mammals, but of course we didn’t. With one exception: we saw four Southern Pudu, the second smallest deer in the world (smaller than a muntjac, but beaten to bottom spot by the Northern Pudu!). They are only 14-18″ tall, and 14-30lbs. Here is a male:

His unforked antlers are no more than 3.5 in long and very delicate.

The first one we saw was a female, and, lucky us, she had a tiny spotted fawn:

The IUCN considers these deer Near Threatened overall, and the Chiloé population has been isolated from the mainland for over 200,000 years, and is a particularly vulnerable separate gene pool.

All that rain means rivers, and waterfalls,

amidst lush rainforest with giant ferns:

and Gunnera tinctoria, known as “nalca”, everywhere:*

The leaves can be 2.5m across:

And beneath them is a secretive lush world of spiny stalks

and 1m tall flower spikes.

The stalks are peeled and eaten just like we eat rhubarb.

In November it is early summer down in Chile, and the wildflowers are starting. This is a delicate vine called Luzuriaga polyphylla, endemic to Chile:

Fuchsias, like many of these plants familiar from our UK or US gardens, come from this part of the world. This is a wild Magellanic Fuchsia:

and so is this:

A ragged looking plant with orange flowers with scarlet centres called Loasa acerifolia:

and finally a Chilean Lantern Tree, Crinodendron hookerianum, found only in Chile; it is much loved by hornets, so we beat a hasty retreat:

Everywhere we saw Chilean Firebush, but I’ll let that wait for another day.

PS * Around the time of anti-goverment protests in 2019, a vegetable vendor in Puerto Montt dressed himself in nalca leaves. He went viral, and became a symbol of the protests, known as Nalcaman:

Pumas are solitary animals, by and large, unlike African lions, and we do not think of them as sharing their food with the larger community. It turns out this is not true.

The fourth puma, who we nicknamed Goldie, was hanging around Petaca and her cubs, and she had not eaten. Angelo told us that the female was familiar, living in the same area, and quite possibly a distant relative. He said that the mother would probably let her feed eventually, but not till she and the cubs were done. Since they were all asleep we nipped back to the vehicle for a quick coffee, and while we were there Goldie made her move. These photos are taken from further away and are not great but they tell the story. She circled around to the far side of the kill:

and grabbed a first bite:

Petaca arrived.

Watch Goldie’s body language in the next few shots:

But as Angelo had predicted, once she had made her point Petaca let Goldie eat:

She settled next to the kill so Goldie couldn’t drag it away:

though she shifted it just enough so that you can see the poor guanaco’s head:

Petaca even fell asleep.

Something in the distance attracted their attention:

Replete, Goldie moved a little way off, and groomed.

Here’s a video:

Petaca stayed next to the kill, ever vigilant:

Eventually, all the pumas had left the kill. Even Petaca moved away, lurking in the bushes and watching us carefully as we headed for our vehicle:

What a privileged morning. And the last of our pumas.

PS Puma coat color varies quite a bit, from the golden color of Blondie, to the gray of Petaca and her cubs, to the tan of Dark. They never have markings, hence the scientific name Puma concolor, meaning ‘uniform color’.

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.

At one point the female cub had a good sniff at the ground, then savored it in a classic Flehmen response:

She was then joined by her mother:

The two cubs later walked right past one of my friends (I was behind a bush at the time!), and headed for a good vantage point:

Next time, we meet our final puma.

PS The cubs will stay with their mother till they are 15-24 months old.

PPS The Flehmen response is explained here: https://eyesonthewild.blog/2023/08/15/jaguar-encounters-ii/

Guanacos are very endearing animals. About 43″ high at the shoulder, and about 60″ to the top of the head, only a tiny bit shorter than me. This one looked me right in the eye:

They are related to vicuñas, in the camelid family. Llamas and alpacas are the domesticated versions of guanacos and vicuñas respectively, so you might say that a guanaco is to a llama what a wolf is to a dog! In Chilean Patagonia, there are an estimated 160,000 guanaco, and they are considered of Least Concern, but before the Europeans came there were probably 20-50 million of them in the larger region. They are a major food for the pumas.

Often the first thing you see is one on the skyline, standing watch:

They live in small groups, typically all females and their young, with perhaps one adult male:

and they were not very bothered by our vehicle:

We encountered two adults alone in a secluded valley, quite far away from us, and it took us a minute or two to realize what was going on:

Apparently they can stay in their marital embrace for five hours, and we weren’t sure whether they had just met up, or were ready to part. She seemed resigned, or perhaps bored, and a little hungry:

They noticed us, so we gave them some space for their private date, hopefully uninterrupted by any pumas:

She will give birth just under a year from now. The young ones have a special name, “chulengos”, and we were there during the short season when they are born. Concentrating the births means more of them survive the pumas. The chulengos are irresistible:

Irresistible to humans, but also to pumas. The very first puma we saw had just killed a chulengo, and a puma is entirely capable of killing an adult guanaco too, as you will see in my next puma post.

But guanacos are fast, and if they notice the puma in time they will usually escape. Hence the need to stay on ridges, so that an ambush is difficult:

Their thick coat is an excellent insulator against the driving winds of the region, and it is prized as a luxury fibre, like alpaca and vicuña. Indeed, there are places where wild guanacos are sheared and released back into the wild.

In closing, I rather liked this double-bodied but triple-headed coven, because it reminded me of author Hugh Lofting’s two-headed Push-me-Pull-you llama:

“They were very shy and terribly hard to catch. [Predators…….] get most of their animals by sneaking up behind them while they are not looking. But you could not do this with the pushmi–pullyu — because no matter which way you came towards him, he was always facing you.” [The Story of Doctor Dolittle]

[My second puma post, to see out 2024. Happy 2025, and thankyou for reading my blog.]

After our stunning sighting of the mother and cub it seemed clear that finding pumas was a doddle. Next day, we set off at 4am for the one-hour drive to Estancia Laguna Amarga to meet our tracker Angelo. We drove around for a couple of hours, seeing nothing much of anything. We stretched our legs, and looked for wildflowers like this lovely Sand Alstroemeria, or Alstroemeria patagonica, aka Mariposa del Campo, growing stalkless right out of the gravel:

Then a different tracker contacted us on the radio: he had seen something, and he’d meet us there. He pointed at this:

We looked, hard:

Nothing, or maybe a sliver of brownish back?? But an hour later he raised his head, and we saw that he was real, and wearing a white collar:

His name is Dark, and he was the alpha male for a very large area, where he would father all the cubs. He was collared by the Cerro Guido Conservation Foundation, who are based on a neighboring estancia. Our trackers did not find him via the collar, because they don’t have the tracking equipment; it was just skill, great eyes, and a dollop of luck.

We were told that Dark is shy and does not like people, and indeed after sitting, stretching, and defecating he went back to sleep behind the bush.

In the vicinity there were three horses (circled, top right), and some guanaco. This equine trio are feral, but unlike most horses they do not run at the scent of puma, they just watch carefully from a distance. The puma is circled, bottom left.

The guanaco, out of shot in the photo above, reacted quite differently. One whiff of Dark, and they were off:

About two and half hours after we arrived, Dark finally showed himself fully,

and immediately walked languidly off up the hill:

with a brief irritated backwards glance:

We tried to follow him, but he was having none of it.

A frustrating morning, and we arrived back exhausted after nearly 10 hours. Clearly seeing pumas is not as easy as it had seemed the day before!

PS The total puma population in the Torres del Paine National Park and its neighboring estancias is estimated at between 50-200 animals, but nobody really knows. This story tells you a little more about the conservation project at Cerro Guido.

Transforming attitudes towards pumas in Patagonia