Pumas of Patagonia

First Sighting

The warm light of the rising sun casts everything – the grasses, the guanaco, the puma – in the same golden glow. I know there’s a lion on the hillside 50 yards away. A guide with two guests are watching her as I arrive. I’m looking where their cameras are pointed. I can’t see her. The moment she stands, the motion catches my eye. She’s half-heartedly stalking a few guanaco that are grazing over the next hill. If it might be easy, why not give it a try?

They know she’s there. She turns back, stretches, and scrapes the ground (marking behavior) before returning to the last remains of a kill she’d been feeding on.

I sit down to watch as she casually pulls the carcass. Her ease reveals her strength.

Her shoulder muscles ripple as she grabs a leg and deftly pulls the entire carcass off the ground. My guide knows through the puma trackers that this kill is three days old. “They’re done with it.” Ginger, the cat in front of us now, is probably scavenging it. Dania, Ginger’s sister, likely made the kill.

Ginger moves off over the left side of a hill as the caracaras move in. We walk along the right side of the hill out of sight. She’s moving faster than we are, so as we get to the back of the hill, she’s rounded the backside and crosses just yards in front of us, never even glancing our way. This is the magic of the Chilean Patagonia pumas.

A Little History

The lands around Torres del Paine National Park had long been working sheep ranches (estancias). In 1995, a severe winter storm, dubbed The White Earthquake, devastated these farms. Six feet of snow and subzero temperatures resulted in the loss of 176,000 sheep. Many ranchers quit and sold their land instead of rebuilding. The owners of this estancia stayed on their land but didn’t replace their livestock. The “unused” twenty-three square miles of their land reverted to grassland. Guanacos and rheas returned to graze on their native land. And the pumas followed.

As puma sightings became more common, our guide approached the estancia’s owners, paying them to use their land to track and film pumas. The estancia now devotes all its efforts to puma conservation and tourism. On this land that used to see sheep ranchers actively hunt pumas (despite puma hunting being illegal in all of Chile), the densest population of pumas on the planet now exists. It is estimated that twenty pumas currently use parts of this land.

Habituation of Generations of Wild Cats

Rupestre is the Queen of Torres del Paine. She is a mountain lion made famous as the star of BBC’s Dynasties II with David Attenborough and Netflix’s Predators (among others). These film crews followed Rupestre for two years as she raised four cubs (one of which is Dania) to independence and ended the following spring when she gave birth to another four cubs (one of which is Ginger).

Dania and her littermate, Petaka, both have two cubs with them this year, who are growing up amid their own paparazzi on these same lands. The people and cameras are simply a benign part of the landscape of no consequence to the cats. This allows us to watch them living their lives without help or harm from us.

Dania

Ginger sauntered off into the park. We are not allowed to follow her. Claudio, our lion tracker, has spied one better. It’s Dania and her two four-month-old cubs. They are resting over a small hill, barely visible. We wait.

A lot of this trip is spent watching cats sleep. My phone is full of pictures of my own cats sleeping. Every time they stretch or tuck their head, I think, “Oh! He’s so cute!” and snap another picture.

It’s clear to me that the others in my group (despite having pet cats at home) don’t have phones full of cat pictures because they are otherwise occupying themselves, waiting for the cats to stir.

Cats are nothing if not patient; the way they sit perfectly still for upwards of an hour waiting for just the right moment to move while hunting.

Accordingly, our patience pays off. The family of three gets up, enjoys post-nap greetings, and walks along a ridge in front of a distant blue mountain.

The kittens play. Dania tries to get them to come with her and eventually gives up and lies back down in a patch of tall green grass.

The kittens stalk and pounce on each other. Then they disappear in the tall grass, too.

We take a midday break, returning in the late afternoon. A flick of an ear and a cat stretch reveal the family to be just where we’d left them. They don’t get up before sunset ushers us away.

“It’s a farting day”, guide Diego Arroyo explains. Their stomachs are full, they’re digesting, and are rarely active in the one to two days after leaving a kill. If an easy opportunity were to present itself, Dania would hunt, but she won’t seek out an opportunity and put in the hard work of stalking and chasing for another 7-10 days. Her hunger has to build enough to stir her motivation into action.

What will tomorrow bring?

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