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

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!