Wildlife in Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine

Because we were fortunate enough to have a botanist along with us on the work crew, I got to improve my knowledge of botany a little bit. There are many interesting plant species in the park, and we were there at the perfect time to see the majority of them in bloom. This one, for example, is the amaryllidacea “Mariposa del campo” Alstroemaeria patagonica:

This one is the scrophulariacea Calceolaria biflora (same genus as the flower in the previous post, which was C. uniflora. C. tenella is common as well):

And this is the common proteacea shrub Embothrium coccineum:

I didn’t take many bird photos, because I didn’t bring my camera with a zoom lens (wise choice, as I would have spent half the time taking photos). But I just had to take pictures of the Darwin’s rhea Pterocnemia pennata. I also saw the Baird’s sandpiper, the scale-throated earthcreeper, the Patagonian sierra-finch, the mourning sierra-finch, the grass wren, several austral pigmy-owls, a white-throated tree-runner, lots of South American snipes, the striped woodpecker, and the cinnamon-vented ground-tyrant.

There were not a lot of mammals there for a national park. A month in Denali National Park, for example, would provide one with the chance to see a small zoo’s woth of species. In Torres Del Paine I saw mice, tracks of the huemul deer, puma tracks, and a lot of foxes like this Pseudalopex griseus pup:

The dominant mammal in the low parts of the park was the guanaco. I saw many, many, many guanacos. The young guanacos here are called Chulengo:

And I am leaving on the eighth of this month.