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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The post Pumas of Patagonia appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

Iconic Patagonia

Patagonia is known for its dramatic granite towers jutting up from the steppe, reflecting in quiet lakes. Since the last century, it has been a backpackers’ dream destination. There is beauty in every direction. This March, I traveled to Torres del Paine National Park at the end of the Earth along an eastern spur of the Andes Mountains.

Getting There

The first leg of the trip took me three hours from my home airport to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, I took a ten-and-a-half-hour red-eye to Santiago, Chile. After a layover there, I boarded the last plane to fly another three hours south to Puerto Natales, Chile. (Chile is a loooooong country!). The last bit was just a forty-minute ride to the hotel. Twenty hours after I left my house in North Idaho, I am 7325 miles away on the tip of the Southern Hemisphere. I’m running on adrenaline.From everywhere we went over the next six days, I could see the Paine Massif and its iconic trio of towers. Rising almost 10,000 feet from the grassland, they are separated from the mountain range and glaciers, so you can drive (or hike) around them. It’s hard to wrap my head around that topography. There aren’t many places in the world where such grand mountains rise from sea level. For context, the distance from Mt. Everest’s base camp to the summit is “only” 11,430 feet. (Of course, you start at 17,600 feet and need supplemental oxygen).

Promises of what we’ll see in this dramatic landscape.

Except that the ostriches are rheas, the llamas are guanaco, and the armadillo is a hairy armadillo. Our guide was slightly annoyed that the caution signs didn’t depict his South American animals: “None of them are our species except the lion!”

Salty Lakes

Many lakes in and around Torres del Paine National Park are closed systems, fed only by rainwater with no inlet or outlet. This situation allows salt accumulation, resulting in alkaline water. In this unique high pH environment, bacteria precipitate calcium, trapping sediment in layers.

Over thousands of years, white rocks resembling coral, called stromatolites, formed. Stromatolites are some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. The photosynthesis by the bacteria within these “rocks” helped to create our atmosphere 3.5 million years ago. The unique environment required for their formation exists in only a few places worldwide. It’s these salty waters that attract the unexpected Chilean flamingo.

Bones and Scavengers

The only significant scavengers on the Patagonian steppe are raptors who pick the carcasses clean. In the absence of mammal scavengers like hyenas, who eat bones, or canids, who chew and relocate bones, bleached, weathered bits of skeletons accumulate on the landscape. Grasses grow through them, and they develop a beautiful patina.

Andean condors, one of the largest flighted birds in the world, soar on ten-foot wingspans to spy carrion from afar.

Southern crested caracaras, white-throated caracaras, and chimanga caracaras are falcons that both hunt and scavenge the grasslands. The crested caracaras always look like gangsters to me.

Two pairs of black-chested buzzard-eagles engage in aerial territorial displays south of the park. They are squat, stocky hawks (despite buzzard and eagle in their common name, they are neither). They feed primarily on invasive European hares and rabbits.Other birds I’d never seen before…

Guanaco 

These camelid species, related to llamas, are the most common wild animals in the area. As prey animals, they are always on alert with a quizzical face, a soft, bi-lobed prehensile nose/muzzle, and enviable eyelashes framing large, soft, dark eyes.

Their woolly coats have long outer hairs that form a skirt along their comically narrow waists. On their long legs and soft hooves, they can run up to forty miles/hour. These are the puma’s primary prey. Weighing 175-250 pounds, it’s an amazing feat for a 110-pound female lion to bring one down to feed her family.The sheep pastures are fenced to keep the sheep in. Adult guanacos can easily jump these fences. Their calves, called chulengos, cannot. Along the roadways near the small towns, chulengos congregate at the fences.

Their mothers will come back for them, but the chulengos are distressed, pacing the fence lines. Sometimes, pumas will use the fences as a hunting strategy. However, pumas are not tolerated by sheep ranchers. Hunting is illegal, so livestock guardian dogs are used to haze the big cats away.

Pumas

Patagonia pumas have been the stars of films like the recent BBC’s Seven Worlds, One Planet (episode three), and Dynasties, Netflix’s Predator series, and Our Great National Parks. The films document the dramatic lives of females raising cubs. Every film crew following a habituated mountain lion produces kittens growing up with filmmakers as part of their typical scenery. In 1995, it took a National Geographic filmmaker two years to earn the trust of a puma to make his film Puma: Lion of the Andes. Now, anyone with the resources can sit among these regal cats without disturbing them as they go about their daily lives. What a privilege to be accepted as part of nature and watch these cats being cats.

Next up: all about pumas!

Puma: from the Quechua language for “powerful one”

If you’re interested in purchasing or licensing any images you see here, please email me at SNewenham at exploringnaturephotos.com, and I’ll make it happen.

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The post Chilean Patagonia appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.