While Patagonia is often at the forefront of people’s minds as a hiking destination, its attraction for wildlife watchers shouldn’t be overlooked. The region offers some tremendous opportunities for wildlife encounters. And just like an African safari, it comes with its very own list of the ‘Big 5’ species to see. Here’s our guide to these most iconic of Patagonian animals.
1. The puma
The puma is Patagonia’s apex predator, and the thrill of seeing one in the wild is as great a wildlife experience as you’ll find anywhere in the world. Pumas are found across Patagonia, but the best place by far to see them is in Torres del Paine, where you can join dedicated puma tracking trips.
The puma is the largest cat in the Americas, measuring just over 8 feet long (up to 2.5m). They’re solitary animals who prey primarily on guanacos – another one of Patagonia’s Big 5 wildlife species. However, wherever ranchers raise sheep, they have frequently come into conflict with pumas. The species is protected in Chile, but hunting is still permitted in parts of Argentina.
Pumas play an important role in managing their ecosystems. They keep herds of guanacos on the move and prevent overgrazing, while the carrion left behind their kills supports a wide variety of species as well as returning nutrients to the soil.
The pumas of Torres del Paine have become particularly famous thanks to their starring roles in wildlife documentaries for the BBC and National Geographic. The wide open steppe of the region makes spotting them far easier than in other locations. Tracking is done in a combination of vehicle and foot, with highly trained guides (many of them former hunters) attuned to the ways of this charismatic species offering as good a guarantee as possible of a close (but safe) encounter.
2. The Andean condor
Perhaps no other species distils the essence of the craggy mountains and wide open horizons of Patagonia than the Andean condor. This magnificent bird can be found effortlessly soaring through the skies of the region, and spotting one high on the wing is an essential rite of passage for any Patagonia traveller.
At a distance it can be hard to get a sense of just how big condors are. They’re the largest and heaviest raptor in the world: their wingspan stretches over a massive 10 feet (3 m) and when they touch ground, they can tip the scales to a chunky 33 pounds (15 kg).
Perhaps it’s this massive bulk that makes condors strangely ungainly. For all their seemingly effortless soaring, they’re actually rather poor at active flying, which is why you’ll find them taking advantage of thermals and high winds to keep themselves aloft while they’re out looking for food.
Condors are a type of vulture and eat carrion rather than actively hunting. This is why they have bald feather-free heads: it’s far simpler and more hygienic to keep clean when you’re picking lunch from a guanaco carcass.
Unfortunately, the common belief that they prey on livestock has often seen them persecuted by ranchers, and especially in the north of their range, condors are classified as a threatened species. Numbers can be slow to recover as condors only raise a single chick every other year, but when allowed to thrive as adults, can live in the wild for up to 50 years.
3. The guanaco
What a wolf is to a dog, so the guanaco is the llama: the wild ancestor of a species long domesticated by humans. Guanacos are a member of the camel family and can be found across Patagonia, from mountains and steppe to grazing along the shores of the Atlantic coast. They’re a truly adaptable species and can subsist on the thinnest and most nutrient-poor plants.
Guanacos are one of the most elegant animals you can see in Patagonia; they’re almost gazelle-like with their long necks and light frames. They live in single sex herds, so that there is always a pair of eyes on the lookout predators. If you see a small herd of up to about ten guanaco, they’re likely to be all female; males congregate in larger bachelor herds (watch out for them nipping each other’s legs: it’s how they fight for dominance).
Patagonia’s original human inhabitants hunted guanacos for meat, wool and leather, but the species is now fully protected. Guanacos mainly have to worry about pumas now, their main predators. When puma tracking, the presence of guanacos is often a sign that a puma might be nearby. If you hear a high-pitched call that sounds something like a laugh, that’s a guanaco warning others in the herd that they’ve spotted a puma.
4. Darwin’s rhea
Darwin’s rhea is a large flightless bird, and a South American relative of the ostrich. It’s named for the naturalist Charles Darwin, who recorded them for science on his travels around Patagonia in the 1830s. Across the region, they are also known by their local name, nandu. Rheas are less than half the size of African ostriches, standing just over three feet (1m) at the shoulder.
Darwin’s rhea was once widespread across the Patagonian pampa, but its numbers have fallen sharply due to hunting and the harvesting of eggs for consumption. Male rheas work along to raise clutches of up to two dozen chicks. When adults, the rheas can often be found associating with guanacos, to offer each other better protection against predators.
Two of the best places to see Darwin’s rheas are along the wild coast of Peninsula Valdes in Argentina, or in the Chacabuco Valley of Patagonia National Park in Chile’s Aysen region. The conservation organisation Rewilding Chile has been working in the latter on a captive breeding and reintroduction programme for the birds. Through our Conservation Fund, Swoop Patagonia is proud to be a supporter of Rewilding Chile’s important work.
5. The huemul
The last species of Patagonia’s Big Five is also its most diminutive and hardest to see due to its rarity: the huemul deer.
Huemul are a medium-sized deer species, standing around 3 feet (90 cm) at the shoulder. They’re distributed across Patagonia, from the Chilean Lake District all the way to the tip of South America excluding Tierre del Fuego. However, their populations are both tiny and very fractured: in Chile it’s believed that there are only around 1500 huemuls left in the wild – and fewer than that in Argentina. Officially listed as an endangered species, it has complete legal protection in both Chile and Argentina.
Like many deer, huemuls are very shy creatures. Their preferred habitat is scrubland and lenga forest, making them hard to see – but especially rewarding if you do.
The main threat to the huemul is habitat loss, especially where ranching and land clearance has caused its range to become fragmented. To help counter this, in 2022 t Rewilding Chile began creating a national huemul corridor, buying up private land to connect it to the national parks that form the Route of the Parks along the southern spine of the country.
If you’re not lucky enough to spot a huemul in the wild in Patagonia, there is still one place where you can be guaranteed a sighting. The huemul is one of the two animals on Chile’s coat of arms, alongside the Andean condor.
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