By John Crockett (Colby College)
This week we put an end to our science, spending a few more days on birds and vizcachas before returning to Cochrane. The last days of field surveys were particularly fruitful. We saw a great deal of waterfowl, including 172 yellow-billed pintails and 73 speckled teals on one lake near the western edge of the Chacabuco Valley. The next two mornings were spent on high lakes, Laguna Pepa and Laguna Edita, surrounded by lenga trees full of fall color and distant vistas of snow-covered peaks. These lakes were home to many great grebes, some of which had chicks with them. These were some of the best birding mornings, both in numbers of birds seen and scenic beauty.
America’s birding sweetheart, Nina Ferrari, birds on the banks of Laguna Pepa. Just out of frame: great grebe with chicks.
In the afternoons, we surveyed for vizcacha in the west end of the park. This area burned almost exactly a year ago in an accidental fire whose suspected origin was a candle at a roadside shrine. Lightning is extremely rare here, so the vegetation is generally not adapted to fire. Since many of the cliffs in this area were surveyed prior to the fire, we were interested in the impact it may have had on vizcacha presence and abundance. As far as we could tell, the vizcacha were doing quite well. Some of these cliffs formed particularly good vizcacha habitat, with boulder fields at the base and ample vegetation, and in one of these we set a new record for vizcacha seen while standing in one place at 7. The working hypothesis (n.b. not related to any actual scientific hypotheses, just wild conjecture) of Team Vizcach is that the rodents took shelter within the crevices they call home and thus avoided fire mortality. Many of the areas directly below cliffs with vizcacha had relatively low fuel loads, and some avoided burning. Other areas burned completely but have been quickly recolonized by exotics like mullein and thistle.
The view from our last vizcacha cliff above the headquarters of Conservacion Patagonica
On Friday, after a quick bird survey, we returned to Cochrane and settled back in to life at base. We planned to knock out our last few classes and then set out for a five-day trip in the Jeinimeni National Reserve to the North. However, the weather report included torrential rain for the next week, so we decided instead to push our finals a week early and postpone the backpacking in hopes of better weather. This set off the most intense week of academics all semester, with three finals and a draft of our final research paper due. The rain did come, adding an appropriately gloomy tone to “finals week,” although we were all happy not to be hiking in it. At the end of the week, sunny (though cool) weather returned and we were eager to set out on our last backpacking trip.
The floor of this cave was carpeted in guanaco scat for reasons known only to the guanacos. In foreground is the skull of a young guanaco, or chulengo.
(Top photo: The group feeding under the meager shade of a burnt Discaria shrub. Just out of frame: 117 yellow-billed pintails, two cinereous harriers, and a kestrel.)