by Baillie Stein, of Colby College
Midday on February 20th, I was sitting in the back of Blue Luv: our big, blue, well-worn, rugged Chevy SUV with “Round River Conservation Studies” emblazoned on either door. We were bringing up the rear of our caravan of cars—all similarly named (there was Red Love, Green Machine, and Blanquita)—on the way to Patagonia National Park (PNP). This was our first long term trip in the field, seven days full of biodiversity surveying, and there was excitement in the air as both teams, Chucao and Tero, made the trip from our basecamp in Cochrane along the Baker River to Chacabuco Valley and PNP. As we turned onto the park’s main road the valley spread out before us. We were not made to wait long before we got to see some of the subjects of our research; soon after pulling into the park a harem of twenty guanacos—one adult male, a dozen or so adult females, and a handful of juveniles (known here as chulengos)—seemed to be waiting to greet us. We continued towards the Visitor’s Center and realized that our encounter with those guanaco had not been so uncommon, many groups of the native grazers clearly felt very comfortable in and around the human activity associated with the Visitor’s Center. We spent the next two hours or so exploring the brand new exhibit within the center. Beginning with an overview of the park and surrounding area, guests are then thrust into a six room gallery focusing on the effects of the Anthropocene within the park, and more broadly, around the whole world. The mini-museum includes a bigger than life representation of the rapidly growing human population, a section dedicated towards environmental justice around the world, a walk through human impact in Chile, and more.
Four guanaco, three adults and one chulengo, enjoying the imported grass outside of the visitor’s center of PNP.
That evening we had an introduction to the specific methodology of our research. In groups of two, over the next three days, we were going to do walking (and a few driving) transect surveys of the entirety of PNP. Starting towards the section of the park that was farthest west, the park had been divided into transects with 2 kilometers between them each—one group of transects going directly south from the road, and another going directly north. We went to sleep that night feeling excited, with guanaco visiting our dreams.
As is often the case in field research, the next morning was an early one. We all had at least six kilometers to cover that day, and many of us had to drive nearly an hour and half to get dropped at our transects. Equipped with binoculars, compasses, field notebooks, a GPS, rangefinders, lunch, water, and lots of sunscreen, I got into Blanquita with my field partner Siena and two other pairs. We were the groups who would cover the transects farthest west and so we basically had to drive back out of the park the way we had come the day before. Once our three groups went our separate ways Siena and I turned to each other grinning from ear to ear—we felt like real adventurers. The transect that we were assigned that day was traveling south following a steep hillside, far from the typical flat habitats that guanaco typically prefer, so our expectations for the day were not high. Instead we focused on finding the path of least resistance through the spiky cushion plants that inhabited the hillside. Soon we realized that we were a hundred meters off of our transect; we had drifted too far to the west. So we bushwhacked our way diagonally up the slope, focusing on finding footing amongst loose rocks and painful pits of spikes. After ten minutes of that, I heard Siena whispering my name. I looked up and over towards where she was pointing and my jaw dropped. There, less than thirty meters in front of us, was a solitary guanaco. He was calmly chewing calafate leaves and looking at us, completely unbothered. Our instructors had explained to us that many guanaco in the park were very skittish, but those closer to the Visitor’s Center (like the one we were face to face with) were acclimated to human presence. So Siena and I stood where we were for fifteen minutes or so, basking in this moment that had made all of the burrs and spikes in my socks and shoes worth it. And so did the guanaco. Then, taking his time, he began eating his way down the slope.
A solitary male guanaco that Siena and I encountered on our first transect. This was one of six that we saw that day. After the three days of surveying, I had seen eighty-four.
Riding the rush of recording our first live sighting, Siena and I continued to climb higher on the slope, hoping to get as close as we could to our target coordinates. We had not been climbing for more than twenty minutes when movement caught my eye further down the slope. I got Siena’s attention by quietly exclaiming “Three guanaco!” As Siena marked our coordinates, the time, and the guanacos’ cardinal direction from us, I raised the rangefinder to my eye to measure their distance from us. “Four, no five!” I said excitedly, and as Siena looked through her binoculars the day got even more exciting: she thought one of the guanaco was a chulengo! Because the guanaco were far down the slope, and huddled amongst the tall grasses, we could not definitively ascertain whether the smallest one was a chulengo but the possibility was still exciting to us. The rest of the day was less exhilarating, and we had to stop our transect sooner than we had planned due to a combination of blisters and an inconveniently placed cliff, but overall we had still seen six guanaco so we couldn’t complain. And as we began to reconvene with the rest of the group, it was clear that the day was a success. The entire census was a success; over the next two days, the twenty-seven of us would walk over 130 kilometers and record over 1,200 guanaco.
Three of the five guanaco from our second sighting. Furthest to the left is the possible chulengo.
After three long days of hiking through spiky cushion plants, over steep hills, and through flooded grasslands (called Mallines) we were all feeling accomplished and successful in our mission. But also very tired. So as a nice change of pace after the guanaco surveying was done, we learned that we would get to go to a captive breeding center for Ñandú: emu-like birds found in the Patagonian Steppe. So at midmorning on the 24th our entire group piled once again into our caravan of cars and, for the very first time, drove east rather than west out of our campsite. It wasn’t long before we were driving through the huge fenced area that marked a transition zone for Ñandú that had been bred at the center, but were being released into the wild. Our faces were glued to the windows as we drove. I was the first in my car to spot three birds moving parallel to us fifty or so meters away, their running mechanics so reminiscent of Jurassic Park. After we had passed through a police checkpoint (the area is kilometers away from the Argentinian-Chilean border), we pulled up on the breeding compound: a few small building with a handful of solar panels and six huge corrals stretching out in a row underneath the wide open sky. We had the unlucky timing of reaching the center after it had received two other groups of visitors, so the Ñandues were worked up. As we waited for the birds to calm down, we shared mate with the three workers: one full-time employee and two college students who lived at the center in two-month intervals. After forty minutes of passing the time we were taken in small groups to see the ten adults and ten juveniles that they had in the corrals. It was incredibly useful to see the birds up close because at this time in the year the juveniles were four or five months old—almost sub-adults—so differentiating between age classes in the field would have been hard without seeing any live specimens beforehand. It was also just downright awesome to get so see them so close, although even those of us in the first group of visitors were too much for the skittish juveniles who all ran to the farthest corral at the noise of us. Overall it was a good way to relax before our final transects the following day, looking for Ñandú in the surrounding area.
Two adult Ñandues at the captive breeding center.
On our final day of research we woke up extra early—we had just one shot to cover all of the land east of our camp until the Ñandú breeding center. As we all unloaded from the cars, the wind was howling; one of our instructors estimated it to be blowing at 60 km/h at least. It felt like the kind of wind that would sweep you away if you weren’t careful. This time we were traveling east to west, rather than north to south. The six of us going north of the road got on our way along the fence line—each of our transects would be walking from that fence east towards another one 4-6 km away. There would be 1.2 km between each transect so we left the first group at their marker: 1.2 km into the fence line. My partner Gabe, and I stopped at our marker 2.4 km out. We could see a steep hill rising out of the earth, directly in the direction that we were meant to be going. At 9:30 exactly, the agreed starting time, we set off walking along the spike-dominated-dry landscape. It was another case of finding the path of least resistance through the painful shrubs. Two and a half hours later, we had finished our transect with no live sightings to account for— though we had seen three separate traces of egg shells. We loaded into the car with the other four with whom we’d gone north and discovered that our smaller section was rather barren—three Ñandú sightings out of the six of us. Our sullen moods changed however when Shalynn, who had been on an individual transect nearby, returned to the car and told us of the 23 Ñandues that she’d seen. Feeling much better than we had been feeling moments before, we sped off down the road back to camp, eager to hear how the other transects had fared. From the stories we heard soon after returning, we learned that this year’s census had recorded the most live sightings over the last five years of the project: over 50 Ñandues! Having counted over 1,200 guanaco, and over 50 Ñandus, we all felt that the research had been a success.
February 26th was our final day in Patagonia National Park and, because we were done with our research, it was a day to explore the park as a park. So after a brief quiz on the region’s Natural History, we drove from our campsite to the Mirador de Doug Thompkins, which overlooks Lago Cochrane and has an excellent view of San Lorenzo, the second tallest peak in Patagonia. We spent the day hiking the Lago Chico trail, which looped through small valleys and around the lake that gives the trail its name. The trail was beautifully kept and excellently built—we could see the vision that the Thompkins’ had for the park. We stopped midway through to admire Lago Chico and a few of us took the chance to swim. It was an excellent send off to a beautiful place.