by Rae Tennent, of Carleton College
It’s pretty hard to escape people. In the continental US, it is impossible to get more than 30 miles from a road, so disappearing into the wilderness is only as easy as buying into its illusion. In the Patagonia Fjords of Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, however, wilderness is no illusion. It is possible here to walk for days through the evergreen forest or over bogs without ever walking where another human being has stepped.
On our way in (via 3 hour boat ride from the nearest tiny town) we joke that its an ideal place to start a cult, or to lose your mind. As we rode the boat through the fjords, we often passed through channels between walls of rock. These rocks were jagged and folded, streaked with quartz. On each tiny rock shelf, mosses and ferns sprouted resilient. These metamorphic rock walls have been there since the Jurassic period (some 145 million years ago), but life has had little time to take hold. In the Pleistocene (about 126,000 years ago) tremendous glaciers came crashing into them, scrapping deep grooves into solid rock. When the glaciers retreated, the sea flooded to fill the deep channels, leaving behind a craggy and complex topography of myriad great lumpy mountains rising steeply from deep channels. The result is a rebelliously inaccessible landscape that hides so much of itself from our probing scientific eyes. Back home, its possible to find thousands of scientific papers about any interesting landscape or ecosystem. In the fjords, we are just now doing the initial research. There is no huge catalogue of understanding. It is like a scientific playground with so much left to discover.
The crazy density of plant communities shows here in mats of moss with the audacity to grow thick on vertical rock faces. Photo by Rae Tennent
Our objective on this trip was to do some science, to discover just a tiny bit more about this place. Specifically, we were keeping tabs on the huemul deer population, which we know are stronger in the fjords than any other part of their range. These squat little deer have been forced into smaller and smaller chunks of space as their habitat elsewhere is taken over by sheep and cattle grazing. Luckily, they have a refuge in the fjords, where there population has the potential to thrive without all the disturbances of human use. At this time of year, we were particularly interested in the baby huemul (known as cría), which are born in November and December. We had a variety of methods to search for them, the primary one being transects. We would bushwhack across the landscape, seeking out huemul habitat and recording any sign of them in 250-meter intervals. Huemul tend to prefer open ridgeline areas, where they can sight predators from far out and graze simultaneously.
A huemul mother and her newborn cría hide in the grasses of the Bernardo Fjord. Photo by Adam Spencer
It was on our first bushwhack transect (on Paso del Indio, an island only 3 hours into the fjords) that we made a critical discovery about the plant communities of the fjords: they are dense and water logged. They come in varieties on this theme, from spongy thick sphagnum bogs, to evergreen forests with mats of moss growing 6 inches deep on each branch. In the fjords, it is raining semi-constantly (over 4 meters a year!!), and the plant communities seem to have adapted to soak up every inch of that rainwater, sponge style.
In fact, the fjords have some of the most diverse bryophyte communities in the world. Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) lack veins to carry water from one part of their bodies to another. When water is as abundant as it is in the fjords, they can grow in thick mats on any surface stable enough to hold them. The extreme density of the landscape sometimes made moving forward feel like a battle against the forest itself. There was a moment during a transect on Paso del Indio where I toppled head over heels, heels over head, Rae over log onto what I expected to be forest floor. Instead, what greeted my face was a foam-like cushion of moss covering feet deep layers of fallen twigs, logs, and old moss mats. If there was any floor to be had, it was at least 2 feet below me. It was a cozy spot to plop.
We spent one full day surveying as much as we could of Paso del Indio, but it was soon time to move deeper in. We were collected by boat and rode another 2 hours into the fjords, to our Refugio (base camp) at the base of Bernardo Glacier.
The Agülaf, CONAF’s patrol (and our beloved research) vessel, navigates through the icebergs of Glacier Bernardo. Photo by Adam Spencer
A Glacier! I can hardly express now how excited I was upon my first glimpse it from our boat. I was scanning the bulbous mountain-filled horizon, when suddenly a monstrous river of blue and white appeared before us. Pouring off the western side of the Great Southern Ice Field, Bernardo Glacier is unequivocally gigantic. Even diminished from its former glory (its terminus having retreated about 2 kilometers in the last two years) it looked like a force that could crack rock, that could change the topography of a continent.
It was on the flat, gravely moraines that glaciers leave as a mark of their previous terminus’ that I discovered my favorite type of dense plant life. We were transecting a moraine at the base of Orfhidro glacier (a short boat ride from basecamp) when we entered a strange, red, flat, flooded landscape. Upon closer inspection, it was a boggy type area, with red hillocks of Gackstroemia liverworts. When we stepped on them, the plants gave way to reveal many feet of previous mats of this special plant, decomposing, holding water, forming soils. In fact, it seems the primary objective of many of these communities is the formation of soils – Gackstroemia grows on layers of previous Gackstroemia, in the style of a terrestrial coral reef. Mosses in the forest grow in thick mats over fallen logs and sticks, holding them in place as they decompose. In an area so recently scraped clean, it makes sense that plants would want to hold onto as much decomposition as they can.
Hayden and Cam charge off to see a Glacier. Photo by Rae Tennent
Over the course of our 7 days in the fjords, we managed to find a lot of huemul scat and tracks, more than any other place we’ve studied. We followed huemul trails through the Orfhidro moraine and found a yearling male and female hiding up in the woods. Once, we had a young male circle our tent in the morning, snuffling at our tent ropes, trying to figure out just what we were.
But by far the best experiences with huemul on this trip came not from scientific sweeps, but from the expertise of our cherished field guide, Felidor. Felidor has been a park ranger (guardaparque) in the fjords for 6 years, but has lived in this environment his whole life. In fact, when we asked him if the constant rain of the fjords ever bugs him, he was taken aback by the notion. Of course it doesn’t bug him, because being outdoors means being wet. The two are inherently linked. Over the years of being outdoors in the fjords, he has developed a deep bond with the huemul population there, and an intense expertise. To illustrate: once, we went to survey a flat moraine, sweep style, with one surveyor every 200 meters. We scanned every inch of that landscape, walking it slowly over the course of four hours. In that time, we found 3 huemul. Felidor disappeared in his boat, drove back, and called us over. He had just found three cría and their mothers, and would like us to take the data. He was constantly doing this, disappearing into the brush and finding things we never would have seen. He sometimes appeared to move like a huemul, crouched low in the spiny chaura bushes, scanning the horizon.
The Patagonia fjords are one of mother nature’s remaining best kept secrets. They have their guardian angels, like Felidor, but not many. The majority of the scientific community knows next to nothing about this landscape. The fact that we got to go walk in places no one has walked before and do science that is only being done by our one group was an incredible treat. It was also a powerful lesson. In our modern world, it can often feel like we’ve discovered everything. We know everything to know about ecosystems, and now we need to move quickly and apply that knowledge before the world ends. Crisis mode conservation is important, but it’s important to remember there’s still so much we do not know. What’s more, it’s inspiring to know this! There is still beauty and complexity to discover. For me, it is this unknown, maybe never knowable beauty that keeps my passion for conservation alive. I want to protect the ecosystems I do know, and those for those I don’t know, I assume they are the fjords: mystical, dense with life, and very very worth protecting.