Torres Del Paine Day 2

At this rate I will be back in Antarctica next year before I finish blogging about my trip this year. I was out of town this past week in Boulder, Colorado for a business trip and a search for smoked paprika to cook pheasants (picked up the chestnuts when we were in Billings on our way home). These are a bit hard to find in Glasgow. Now, where was I?

Our second day in Torres we backtracked a bit right away in the morning to get a closer look at the Nineo bushes blooming. I remember this plant blooming from my first visit into the park but I hadn't been back at the right time of the year to see it again until now. They were just starting to bloom and the color of the blooms ranged from deep red to light orange. These plants (like most bushes in Patagonia) are dense and spiny, possibly a defense against Pleistocene herbivory. Today only the guanacos are left to graze on them. We did see a few guanacos too.

Neneo or Mata Guanaco (Anarthrophyllum desideratum)



Neneo with the Torres massif in the background.

Guanaco

One of the hard parts of leading people into the park who have never been there before is trying to convince them that they will see more guanacos closer to the road. The first views are generally outside the park and at a distance with the number of animals increasing closer to the park. I kept telling the people in the bus that we were not going to stop at each group of guanacos we came across and eventually we had good views of a number of herds of these interesting camelids. We were a bit early to see the new crop of young guanacos known as chulengas.

Guanaco

We stopped at the more popular waterfall, Salto Grande, where I now spend more time looking for flowers along the trail than looking at the waterfall. This trip I didn't even make it to the waterfall but I did find one orchid (below). This is the same area where we found a Magellanic Orchid (Chloraea magellanica) in January.


Zapatito de la Virgen (Calceolaria uniflora)
Black-faced Ibis

Long-tailed Meadowlark

Lesser Rhea

Firebush (Embothrium coccineum)

The firebush was in full bloom too. On our way out of the park the hillsides were covered with this shrub in bloom and from a distance the hillsides looked rusty, like the leaves had turned.
We made our way to the Grey Glacier area and had lunch at the hotel there. After lunch we headed towards the beach at the end of the lake where small icebergs from the glacier often come to rest. The beginning part of the trail to the lake heads through some old Nothofagus (Southern Beech) trees with very evident sign of foraging Magellanic Woodpeckers, a species I have looked for without success since I began birding in Chile many years ago. A few years ago my guests even took a photo of a woodpecker to show me after we returned to the bus. He might have gotten away with it too but I recognized the photo from the bird book. Today was no different than any trip I have ever done to Glacier Grey. It rained and I didn't see a Magellanic Woodpecker. I did enjoy wonderful views of a Huemul however. The Huemul is the native deer to southern South America and is quite rare although I have been very lucky to observe them many times in Torres.

Huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus)

Austral Parakeet - these are quite common near Lago Grey.

After we returned to the Hotel are Rio Serrano, Maritza, Sergio and I headed down the new road out of the park for a way just to see what the country was like. We found a small pond off the road with a pair of Spectacled Ducks and a couple of Ashy-headed Geese on it. I managed to get a couple of photos of the ducks and ran across a Chilean Flicker in the trees near the pond too.

Chilean Flicker

Spectacled Duck

Spectacled Ducks

The next morning we headed back to Punta Arenas via the new road. We stopped at the Milodon Cave on our way out. This is a spot the has more literary interest than real natural history interest as it is the supposed home of a piece of Milodon hide that has ties with Charles Darwin and Bruce Chatwin.

The next morning we joined the charter flight in Punta Arenas and flew to Ushuaia, Argentina and boarded the National Geographic Endeavour for the next phase of our journey - Antarctica

Torres Del Paine National Park - Day 1

On November 4th we left Puerto Natales and headed into Torres Del Paine National Park. We took the "old" road to the park through Cerro Castillo. A new road to the park has been finished and is a much more direct route to the south side of the park but we figured that a stop at Cerro Castillo was warranted. They have been working on the new road since at least 1995 when I first went to Torres and it was along the finished portion of this road that I my friend Cory Peterson and I had a Mountain Lion run across the road in front of us - the only time I have observed a lion in the area.

I think the old entrance is a better route into the park because of the variety of habitats it spans and the way the you approach the park with a the massif introduced at a distance across the southern steppe. I have never had the opportunity to take my time along this route as we have always been in a hurry to get to the park and my observation of what appeared to be a Black-throated Finch in the grasslands just beyond Cerro Castillo from the window of the moving bus only make me want to come and spend a lot of time exploring this area more.

Lago Sarmiento overlook

The weather this day was pretty good for patagonia - not too windy and mostly sunny. There was lots of water in small ponds along the road and we saw many Chilean Flamingos in places I had not observed them before. Andean Condors and Black-chested Buzzard-Eagles floated right above us at one stop and we saw many as we drove towards the park entrance. At the overlook above Lago Sarmiento, where we stop for photos of the northeastern end of the park, I wandered across the road to see what birds I could find in the shrubs along a small drainage next to the road. I immediately found an obliging Mourning Sierra Finch and shortly after that a Scale-throated Earthcreeper hopped on fencepost with a millipede in its mouth, then flew to it's nest hole built into the road berm next to me. I managed to get a photo of the bird as it emerged a short while later with a small rock in it's bill.

Scale-throated Earthcreeper

Mourning Sierra-Finch

Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle

We intended to make our way to Laguna Azul after a stop at the waterfalls along Rio Paine but a flat tire on the bus forced us to scrap the Laguna Azul portion of the itinerary. We did get to the waterfalls on the Paine River and found a nice male Torrent Duck sitting on a rock in the middle of the river above the falls. I like this area of the park, including Laguna Azul, because it isn't as heavily visited as other areas of the park and there is a lot of wildlife along the road to Laguna Azul. The downside is that you have to backtrack to get to the rest of the park, probably the main reason it does not have as many visitors.

Sergio and Maritza changing the tire on our bus.
Waterfall on the Paine River
Torrent Duck

Ojo de agua (Oxalis adenophylla) near the Paine waterfall

Rufous-collared Sparrow

Cinnamon-bellied Ground-Tyrant near the Sarmiento entrance to the park.

After our visit to the waterfall we headed through the park to our hotel at Rio Serrano for a late lunch and a free evening. I wandered around the hotel and found a few birds including a Dark-bellied Cinclodes, Ashy-headed Goose, and a Flying Steamer-Duck.

Dark-bellied Cinclodes

Ashy-headed Goose

Flying Steamer-Duck

Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales

Chimango Caracara

After a couple of days in Santiago we flew to Punta Arenas in southern Chile. We arrived on a typically windy afternoon and met our local guide, Maritza and our driver Sergio. After claiming our luggage we boarded our little bus and headed north to Puerto Natales. There were many spring ponds along the road with lots of waterfowl including Yellow-billed Pintails, Chiloe Wigeon, and Speckled Teal. There were also more ponds with Chilean Flamingos than I had observed before. It is always a bit of a strange sight to see flamingos in a pond that could easily be somewhere between Miles City and Jordan in eastern Montana.
Chilean Flamingo

Male Upland Goose

There were many Lesser Rheas along the road, with Chimango and Southern Caracaras and an occasional Long-tailed Meadowlark. Upland Geese were omnipresent and many flocks of Black-faced (I prefer Buff-necked) Ibis were scattered along the way.


Southern Caracara

Southern Lapwing

We arrived at Puerto Natales just about dark and had a great meal with the usual great Chilean wine at our hotel.


Black-faced Ibis

Photo Blog 1

Austral Parakeet
Austral Thrush
Mourning Sierra-Finch
Torres Del Paine at sunrise

Learning bird identification

My inquiry for help on Chilean bird identification got me thinking about how I am learning birds in Chile versus how I learned to ID birds in Montana (and perhaps try to explain what should have been a pretty easy ID!).

Although my experience birding in the United States certainly helped me as I continue to learn the birds of Chile, much of my experience learning to ID birds in Chile has been without the benefit of birding with a birder skilled in the Chilean avifauna. There have been times when I have been able to bird with other North American birders, which really helped, and once with a Chilean birder but we were busy with non-birding guests and it was late in the season. In addition, most of my time in Chile was on my way to or from Antarctica which meant I was birding either really early in the season or late in the season when I could snag a quick trip out of town or when I was traveling with non-birding friends for a few days. On top of these limitations, the only field guide I had was the Guia de Campo de las Aves de Chile by Braulio Araya and Guillermo Millie (entirely in Spanish) with mostly black and white line drawings and no range maps. I did learned a fair number of Spanish words related to colors and body parts! When Alvaro Jaramillo produced the Birds of Chile field guide, my ability to ID a number of Chilean birds increased dramatically. If you can only carry one book for Chile, Antarctica, South Georgia and the Falklands this is by far the best book you can get.

My Chilean experience is in direct contrast to my experience learning birds in North America where I had a number of good field guides to use, I started young and had my Dad to teach me, I often birded with other very good birders (and still do), and I can bird during the peak birding times of the season and better yet, all year.

I knew this one was a Bar-winged Cinclodes!

It shows. In Chile, I struggle with what should be fairly straightforward identification because I don't have the benefit of an experienced mentor and I often don't have the time to really spend studying the birds I have questions about because I am leading a group of non-birding guests. I would like to thank Alvaro for taking the time to answer my email concerning an ID that is probably pretty straightforward for him (and hopefully will be a bit easier for me when I finally do get to see a miner in Chile).

All of this really points out to me the benefit of birding with other skilled birders in learning bird identification. I am still a beginning birder in Chile. I keep working at it and asking questions and hopefully one of these days I will feel more confident of my birding skills when dealing with some Chilean birds. I guess it helps reinforce my belief that one of the best ways to get better is to bird with other good birders no matter what your current skill level is.

Miner ID question

I was going through my photos from my last trip to Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile in January this year and remembered these photos of what I believe is a miner but I can't figure out what species. Anyone out there familiar with Chilean miners? I guess that this could be a cinclodes but it didn't seem quite right at the time.

These photos were taken at the Sarmiento entrance to Torres on January 17, 2007. (click on the photos to enlarge).

(added at 20:07 - Alvaro Jaramillo, author of The Birds of Chile, let me know that it is in fact a Bar-winged Cinclodes, the longer tail of the cinclodes is a good field mark). Still learning!

Neruda birds

One thing that I have tried to do during the last two trips I led in Chile is read Pablo Neruda poems to my guests from this great illustrated book of Neruda bird poems from Lynx Edicions. I have tried to read poems that are pertinent to the birds we see on our trip but I haven't been very good about getting many poems in. One that I always manage to read is one that I have pretty much memorized, not only because it is short but because it is so evocative of the bird he writes about.


Cisne

Sobre la nieve natatoria
una larga pregunta negra


Swan

Above the swimming snow
a long black question


Thanks to David Ringer at Search and Serendipity for prompting this post with the short Neruda quote in his blog header. This quote is from another of my favorite Neruda bird poems titled "The poet says good-bye to the birds"
The last stanza reads in full:

A people's poet
provincial and birder,
I've wandered the world in search of life:
bird by bird I've come to know the earth:
discovered where the fire flames aloft:
the expenditure of energy
and my disinterestedness were rewarded,
even though no one paid me for it,
because I received those wings in my soul
and immobility never held me down.

More Photos from Chile

Torres Sunrise

Beach Forest Undergrowth
Correndera Pipit
Southern Lapwing

Zorro Chilla
Southern House Wren

Chile, January 2007

I am going to start filling in a few blanks of my recent trip to Chile with photos and commentary. I began some post while I was in Chile here. The next few posts will fill take off from there. I will begin with a photo of a waterfowl taken at the hotel pool in Santaigo.

We also did a quick tour of Santiago on Sunday January 15th. I always have enjoyed the ornate stonework on a number of the buildings in Santiago. This was taken across the street from the Presidential Palace.


All of the 17 guests that will be going with me to Torres Del Paine National Park arrived this morning and joined the city tour. That evening we have a wonderful dinner at the hotel where we discussed my expectations for the tour (for them to enjoy themselves) and also what they expected for the next few days.
The following morning, January 16, we were up early and on our way to the airport for the next leg of our trip. We boarded a commercial LAN flight to Punta Arenas with a short stop in Puerto Montt. We arrived in Punta Arenas and it was blowing (imagine that!) and we boarded our bus for a drive to Puerto Natales, where we would spend the night.


















That night we had another great dinner at the hotel and this photo shows most of us gathered around the table with some good Chilean wine waiting for our dinner.

The weather reports did not look good and the next morning had me fearing that we would spend the next 3 days in rainy windy misery at Torres. It was a overcast and windy with brief rain showers during a quick walk along the waterfront. By the time we started into the park however the clouds were beginning to break and we could see sunlight on the mountains (and actually see the mountains themselves!) This photo is an Austral Thrush taken on a walk near the hosteria Las Torres in the park.

This Black-faced Ibis was photographed on the same walk.

By the time we got into the park it had cleared up and was mostly sunny but the wind was still very evident





This is a composite photo of Las Torres, the hotel we stayed at while in the park. More soon.