Author: myip2014

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.

[The red coiffure seemed suitably festive for today. I do hope you have a wonderful holiday.]

One of the largest woodpeckers in the world lives in Patagonia: the Magellanic Woodpecker, Campephilus magellanicus. This is a handsome male: yes, there’s just one in this photo, though he apparently thinks he’s met a rival, living inside Hotel Lago Grey:

He gives him a sideways look:

Perhaps when he looks back his competition will have thought better of it. No such luck, still there:

So he decides that a war dance is the best strategy :

All this while his mate has been waiting patiently for her Don Quixote to give up tilting at windmills :

And her patience is rewarded. Visions of that glossy curly black quiff draw him back to her side:

They have no close relatives, but the closest may be the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. The males can weigh up to 360g, a little larger than a Pileated Woodpecker.

Before I leave this post, Patagonia also has the rather drab Chilean Flicker, Colaptes pitius, a species of woodpecker that forages on the ground like its North American counterparts:

It is a male, because it has a dark mustache :

Our particular interest on this Chile trip was trying to find puma (mountain lion) in Patagonia. The local cattle and sheep estancias are slowly converting to wildlife tourism, and instead of shooting the pumas (which are protected in Chile) they now track them and bring people like us to see them. The animals (some more than others) are getting slowly habituated to vehicles, and don’t act as secretively as they once did, and as they still do in most of the US (where they can be legally hunted).

I’ll tell the tale in four blog posts, chronologically, and perhaps with pauses for other things, so you don’t get too blasé about pumas.

We had been traveling all day from Tierra del Fuego, a 7am start, a 2 hour drive, a ferry across the Straits of Magellan, and another 6 hours on the road. We were almost at our lodge, the Hotel Pehoé on an island in a lake in Torres del Paine National Park. There were a few cars pulled over on the side of the road, so we stopped too. Right by the road a mother puma had killed a baby guanaco for her two cubs, and the mother and one cub were feeding a few feet away, unconcerned. The cub is about two months old.

One cub was nowhere to be seen, but the remaining one was curious and unafraid. In the left foreground you can see the leg of the kill.

The bond between them was almost tangible:

I’m not sure if you can see, but the cub still has blue eyes. The mother groomed her cub thoroughly, from top:

to bottom:

The cub is clearly showing an interest in meat, but it is still nursing as well, which may be what it is trying to do here:

The mother was elegant

and not to be trifled with, keeping a careful eye on her human fans:

After nine minutes they moved slowly off back into the scrub, the cub bounding ahead:

and the mother eventually taking the lead:

And they melted away into the 700 square miles of the park. We were extraordinarily lucky. It is rare to see puma in the national park itself, because the rules require you to stay on the official park road. For the next two days we will be searching outside the park with a tracker.

PS The puma, Puma concolor, has many other names, including mountain lion, and cougar. It is not officially a big cat. There are only five of those, all in the sub-family Pantherinae. Pumas are not in this sub-family, which contains the four cats that can roar – lion, tiger, jaguar and leopard – and their very close non-roaring relative the snow leopard. Instead, they are in the sub-family Felinae, alongside cheetahs, lynx and bobcats.

According to Wikipedia, pumas are the fourth largest cat species worldwide; adults stand up to 90 cm (35 in) tall at the shoulders. Adult males are around 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) long from nose to tail tip, and females average 2.05 m (6 ft 9 in). Males weigh up to 72 kg (159 lb), and females up to 48 kg (106 lb). The largest recorded cougar, shot in 1901, weighed 105.2 kg (232 lb).

Iriarte et al (1990) show that pumas who live nearer the poles weigh much more than they do closer to the equator. In Patagonia, their mean body weight is 55.6Kg, vs 43.6Kg in Arizona. They’re roughly the size of a cheetah, and much lighter than a lion. But they are perfectly capable, very very rarely, of killing humans

[The next several posts will be from Chile, where we spent a wonderful two weeks in November and December.]

This is a Southern Marine Otter, Lontra felina., also known as a Gato Marino (sea-cat) , or Chungungo.

It is the smallest marine mammal, measuring 87 to 115 cm (34 to 45 in) from the nose to the tip of the 13in tail and weighing 3 to 5 kg (6.6 to 11.0 lb). This one is in the Pacific near the mouth of the Maullin River off the coast of Chiloé Island, eating mussels clinging to the rock.

It is found on the Pacific Coast of South America, from Peru to Tierra del Fuego and is the smallest American otter; its closest relative is the North American River Otter., which weighs about three times as much. It is not closely related to the more familiar sea otter of California and the Pacific north west, which can weigh nearly ten times as much.

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It only lives in salt water, and it likes rough and rocky coasts. Just after this photo was taken it was washed off the rock by a large wave, doing a dramatic mid-air somersault (no photo!).

Their dens are usually in caves, and they apparently spend much of their time on land, unlike the Californian sea otter.

Its coarse fur has 2 cm long guard hairs, covering a dense, insulating undercoat, which is why it was hunted for the fur trade. Now it is very hard to find, and we were lucky to see one after a long hunt.

The marine otter is dark brown with fawn on the throat and belly.

and it has webbed paws, with strong claws that allow it to eat both fish and crustaceans.

Here, it was following a clamming boat; the yellow hose in the photo below is the air supply to the invisible divers below water.

The divers dislodge clams, which the otters love. Like the better known and larger sea otters off California, they feed on their backs:

This charming animal is listed by the IUCN as Endangered . They’re legally protected in both Chile and Peru, but the laws are loosely enforced, and they are sometimes killed by fisherman , or for their fur.

To end with, I found this mini-documentary online that has really wonderful footage of a mother otter and her two cubs, both on land and underwater. The commentary is a little mystical for my taste, but the images are quite lovely.The filmmaker is Ben Goertzen , and it won awards at the Jackson Wild Film Festival in 2019.

Yesterday morning at 2am I got back from Chile, and I can’t resist an immediate follow-up to yesterday’s coypu blog. Here he is, in his rightful home:

This is near the mouth of the Chepu River, on Chiloé Island in Patagonia in Chile.

I will tell you more about Chiloé in later posts, but for now enjoy “our” coypu, the only one we saw:

It walked along the grassy islet, showing its webbed hindfeet:

and its dexterous front ones:

Then slipped into the water and swam off (the video is slightly slowed down):

Ironically, and sadly, while they are becoming invasive in Europe they are becoming rare in Chile, as a result largely of hunting. Our guide Jonathan was quite excited to see one.

A ghastly smell wafted across the Tuscan path, as if something had died in the bushes. Casting around for a cause, I realized that just ahead was a patch of tall white mushrooms, mostly lying on their sides after a night of heavy rain.

I had stumbled across a patch of Common Stinkhorns, Phallus impudicus. The source of the first half of the scientific name is obvious; the second half means “shameless”:

It starts as a spherical blob with a gelatinous rim:

When it starts to emerge, the cap is covered in grey mucus:

There is a small hole in the top:

The cap develops a textured surface, and the white substrate breaks through:

This mucus contains the spores, and its powerful smell attracts insects, lots of them:

The sticky mucus gets on their feet, and when they fly off they carry it with them, spreading the spores. Rain, time, and enough flies, remove the mucus, leaving a white sculptural shape, with a texture like tripe:

still strongly scented and attractive to flies:

:

Chacun a son gout.

The stinkhorn family also includes this bizarre fungus, the Red Cage, Clathrus ruber,  aka called the latticed stinkhorn, or the basket stinkhorn, native to Southern Europe. It reminds me of a Whiffleball.

It emerges from a white circular base, and the grey mucus is on the inside of the basket, where the flies still track it down:

It only lasts about 24 hours, then collapses, and the mucus washes away, leaving a red sea anemone shape:

and fragments of the ribs, exposing the interior texture that held the mucus:

These exotic fungi are apparently quite common in Europe, but to me they are yet another natural wonder. Maybe one day technology will allow me to add a link to this post that brings you its horrendous smell. Or maybe better not.

PS The Red Cage fungus has been introduced to both the UK and the US probably on imported garden mulch.

PPS In Maine, we have the Ravenel’s Stinkhorn, which I posted about a while ago: https://wordpress.com/post/eyesonthewild.blog/3750

Autumn in Tuscany, where we spent a week in late October, is definitely the land of mists and mellow fruitfulness. We had three days of torrential, biblical rain, at one stage flooding the small bridge that linked us to the outside world. The spindle berries dripped:

The hawthorn berries dripped:

The Butcher’s Broom, Ruscus aculeatus, whose 1 cm berries emerge from the centre of what looks like a small leaf but is actually botanically a modified stem called a cladode, gleamed in the shadows:

Medlars ripened:

The oak trees were still green, but a variety of galls were swelling. Three different kinds on one branch, sometimes. This first photo looks not unlike varieties of oak apple I know from the US or the UK, but it is bigger, with an encircling coronet, and made by the Andricus quercustozae wasp:

The aptly named Andricus caputmedusae looks innocuously like a sweet chestnut, but it contains a single wasp larva:

and this shiny purple mass is a small Andricus dentrimitratus; it will grow much bigger:

A good description of how galls are formed and why can be found here: https://lpfw.org/our-region/wildlife/gall-wasps/

“Galls are plant growths (similar to tumors) that are induced by various organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and insects. Gall wasps have evolved to “trick” the plant into forming this growth which they then use for food and shelter as they transform from a larva to an adult. The wasp larvae secrete chemicals that mimic growth hormones in a particular plant upon hatching. The chemicals trick the oak into growing a gall on its flowers, acorns, leaves, or stems. The larva is then encapsulated by the gall as it grows, waiting patiently inside until its metamorphosis is complete. “

And all around the wild boars were rooting in the undergrowth, and the mother deer and her (two) fawns risked the hunters to emerge in the early morning mist:

I’ll save the mushrooms for an other time.

PS We are only barely beginning to understand how different (but related) wasps can affect a single tree (often an oak) and then cause quite different galls to be created. It appears that different gall types arise from distinct metabolites. If you would like to know more, read here:

https://academic.oup.com/plphys/article/195/1/698/7571489

[Oops, this was supposed to go earlier, so the intro is now obsolete!]

With Halloween round the corner, my mind turned to dark and spooky things. So here, to mark the season, is a collection of black fungi to make a coven of witches salivate.

This 1″ tall black fungus is a type of cordyceps, Tolypocladium ophioglossoides.  (Thanks to Parker Veitch for the ID). When it is younger it is a yellowish brown, sometimes called golden thread, because below ground are yellow threads that attach to a type of deer truffle, and the cordyceps is parasitic on the truffle.

In close-up, you can see that the speckles are in fact spores being produced on the perithecia, which are minute flask-like vessels embedded in the fungus but protruding through its skin to release their spores.

In pursuit of this photo I lay on my stomach, and my glasses fell out of my pocket, never to be seen again. My most expensive-ever photo.

My favorite name amongst the black fungi is Poor Man’s Licorice, Bulgaria inquinans, not edible despite its name.

The smooth side is the fertile surface, and as it ages the rim curls up and in, creating a cup shape.

Another misleadingly appetizingly named mushroom is the Chocolate Milky, Lactarius lignyotus.

Wikipedia says it is “edible, but of little interest”, so despite its name it won’t show up in a Starbucks drink any time soon. “Milky” mushrooms are so-called because they exude a white latex when broken.

Finally, every witch’s favorite, Dead Man’s Fingers, Xylaria polymorpha.

One feels it could audition for the starring role in Pirates of the Caribbean, waving in the swell, deep on an ocean wreck, alongside Johnny Depp.

Lest you be left thinking that there’s no such thing as a safe and delicious black mushroom, let me assure you that one of the best of all is the Black Trumpet.

But, as always, never ever pick and eat a mushroom unless you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing.