Printouts of maps and other information can be hard to come by at many Chilean national parks. At Puyehue, the CONAF ranger handed us three aged but informative pamphlets about the birds, animals, and flowers we’ve been seeing on our hikes. He dug these out of a drawer in the park office when I asked for a map. He wouldn’t let me keep the trail map, though he let me take a picture. He did give us the pamphlets on birds, mammals, and flowers to keep. I’ve found this kind of information to be rather rare, so I’ve captured the pamphlets here in photographs for future reference as we continue south into Patagonia.
Our most exciting sighting thus far has been the red-headed woodpecker, the Carpintero Negro. It’s a popular bird in Chilean imagery. The one we saw was about 18 inches tall and pecking a large hole in the base of a hardwood tree. It was a shockingly large bird given the woodpeckers I’m used to seeing in the U.S. It also had a what we believe to be a female mate with him, though she worked higher in the canopy, and we couldn’t see her well.
We also spotted the Andean grey fox, the zorro chilla, on a dirt road, and we spotted the Vizcacha (a rabbit with the tail of a squirrel) in a pile of rocks in the Atacama desert.
The Pudu will steal the show if we can spot one of those. We’re taking a special trip to the island of Chiloe in the coming week on a mission to find the miniature deer.
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