Written by Allison Summerly (University of Vermont)
17 February, 2017
Team Aguila
On February 3rd Team Aguila travelled southwest from our base camp in Cochrane to a campo (a farm) in the lower Pascua River Valley. This valley is wet, green and lush, wild and remote, with relatively recent road access and little human influence. We camped at an abandoned military barracks that the landowners graciously offered us to use for the week. On our first morning on the Pascua, we woke early to do bird point counts up the road. After enjoying the amazing bird diversity of the Magellanic evergreen forest – spying green-backed firecrown hummingbirds and curious chucao tapaculos – we walked further up the road, and as we reached its end at the intersection with the Pascua River, we encountered the locked entrance of a large tunnel with large letters painted to spell: Pascua Sin Represas- Pascua without Dams. It was at that moment that we fully recognized the gravity of our work and presence in the valley, and the magnitude of the struggle we were about to become a small part of.
The Rio Pascua and Rio Baker were both in danger of being dammed as part of a massive hydropower project proposed by the foreign corporation HidroAysen. The project would have put three dams on the Pascua and required the largest clear cut in the world to transport the electricity to central and northern Chile. Due to massive pushback from local and widespread activism concentrated under the umbrella organization Patagonia Sin Represas, and shortcomings in the environmental impact assessment submitted by HidroAysen, the project was rejected in 2013. However, there are many signs that HidroAysen maintains strong interest in developing the area. They own the water rights to the river, as they have purchased most private properties in the valley, and they had already begun constructing infrastructure like the tunnel and road we drove in on.
A waterfall we happened upon while transecting the mountains around the campo. Photo by Alli Summerly.
During our time in the valley we were focused on assessing the biodiversity of the campo, one of the last that hasn’t been sold to HidroAysen, and meeting with and learning from the landowner, the Señora. We found through transecting the property that the campo is incredibly biodiverse on a species and ecosystem level. From shrubland, to cypress bogs, to evergreen forest, the landscape seemed to be a mosaic of different ecosystems, each with its own unique flora and fauna. The shrubland was full of calafate (Berberis microphylla) whose berries attract an abundance of birds as well as hungry students. We all ended up with berry-stained lips (and faces, and hands) from munching on the deep blue fruit.
In the bogs we found ourselves wading through thigh-deep sphagnum moss, but nobody minded getting a little wet to take a better look at the beautiful vegetation, which included sundew, a carnivorous plant, and dwarf cypress, a threatened species. While transecting the mountains to the east of the campo we were practically crawling through the dense evergreen coigue forest, getting up close and personal with the mosses, liverworts, and lichen that carpet the forest floor, and the chucao tapaculo, a forest bird that was very curious about our presence.
Fungi and lichen diversity on the campo. Photos by Alli Summerly.
The Señora provided invaluable local ecological knowledge to inform our research and was an incredibly gracious host, inviting us into her home for homemade bread and mate, and letting us play with her adorable puppy. The fact that her and her family have refused to sell their lands to a powerful outsider, choosing instead to stay on their land is a major statement against the dam project, and anything we can do to help them stay there into the future is a contribution to conservation. Our work on the campo has just begun and we hope to use the biodiversity data collected in our survey to summarize the ecological value of the land, and keep the Rio Pascua flowing freely into the future.
Alli plays with the Senora’s puppy as they explore the campo. Photo credit Shelby Sawyer.
Top photo: The Pascua river valley in an early morning rainstorm. Photo by Alli Summerly.