This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
Guanacos at Sunrise
I was looking at some old photos taken in Torres del Paine National Park when this caught my eye. There were a lot of good landscape photo opportunities, but we were there for pumas. I liked this dawn view of a mother guanaco and her chulengo though.
This is the same female puma I posted recently. She napped a lot and occasionally yawned. Life is good for pumas in Torres del Paine National Park.
This puma may look menacing, but she is just finishing off a nice long yawn. She is called “Sister” and the few times we saw her she was very relaxed. In fact, she did a lot of sleeping when we saw her, just like my cat, Rosie, here at home.
When my two friends and I went to Torres del Paine National Park to photograph pumas in May of 2016 the animal we saw most often was the guanaco. The guanaco is a camel-like animal. It stands 3 to 4 feet at the shoulder and weighs 200 to 300 lbs. It is the primary large prey species of the puma in Patagonia.
Guanacos live in herds composed of females, their young, and a dominant male. When they see a puma, they alert the herd to flee with a high-pitched, bleating call. We were always listening for those calls and we heard them fairly frequently.
In writing this I paid a quick visit to Wikipedia. I knew that in addition to guanacos there are similar camelid animals called called llamas, vicunas and alpacas in South America. However, I was surprised to learn that guanacos are the wild parent of the domestic llama. Likewise, the vicuna is the wild parent to the domesticated alpaca. In that way they are like the wild caribou and its domesticated descendant, the reindeer. At least I knew that relationship.
In May 2016 I went to Torres del Paine National Park with two friends in search of pumas or mountain lions as we know them. The park is on the Chilean side of Patagonia. We had great success in that we saw 18 different pumas in six days and photographed twelve of them, as I recall. It involved a lot of hiking. This puma, however, showed itself when we were driving back to our hotel after sunset.
Pumas are protected in Chile, but they kill some sheep and the ranchers shoot them without regard to the law on ranches throughout Chile (and Argentina). Fortunately, many more pumas are safe today thanks to the work of conservationist Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kris, who have bought millions of acres of ranches and converted those lands into national parks with the cooperation of Chile and adjoining Argentina. Unfortunately, Doug died in a kayaking accident in December of 2015. His wife, however, continues his legacy. For more about Doug Tompkins, see this article.
Mountain Lions (aka pumas, cougars, catamounts etc.) have eluded me here in the United States, so last May I went to Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia. I had learned that it was much more feasible to find and photograph them there. I also hired a guide who was worth every penny in finding mountain lions or, as they are known there, pumas.
If you’d like to see more of my photos of Torres del Paine pumas, click here. Click on the first photo and then just toggle through them using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard or use the navigation guide at the bottom of each image. By the way, the link is to a new website I am building. It is still in the early stages, but the majority of the puma images I plan to use on it are there now.
The trip was a great success. I’ll do a more detailed report on it in the future.
