I keep plowing through photos from recent trips. The latest completed collection is from my May Pumas of Patagonia tour. As with my other recent trips to Chile, I’m splitting the images into two galleries. Mainly because I always seem to take way too many puma photos!
So this week I’ll share the non-feline content, and pumas will debut in a separate gallery next week. You can jump straight to the photo archive to see the full collection of (53) new photos from this trip. Or check out the short preview below.
On our very first morning we had a nice sunrise, but I chose to ignore the mountains and sought out some silhouettes to work with in the opposite direction. Luckily, some guanacos obliged.
Soon after this sequence, the guanacos spied a puma and began alarm calling. Unfortunately, the cat was out of sight on the back side of the hill.
Guanacos are ubiquitous on the edges of Torres del Paine. Though they’re a common sight they continuously provide interesting photo opportunities.
A view of the famed Towers of Paine from the shores of Laguna Amarga.
Salt crystals ring the shores of Laguna Amarga, a saline lake.
This trip gave me my first chance to get close photos of the Torrent duck, a dynamic species that prefers hanging out near river rapids (much like one of my favorite waterfowl species, the Harlequin duck). This is the female.
It was also my first chance to see a male Torrent duck. Both the male and female of this species are quite striking, aren’t they?
This drake was hanging out right near the brink of a large waterfall on the Rio Paine.
While we were staking out pumas, a couple of different grebe species swam by, including this pair of Great grebes.
Then a tiny White-tufted grebe swam by. It was my first time photographing either species.
It was nice to see the Austral pygmy owl again, the first pygmy owl species I ever saw (ten years ago!).
View the full Patagonia 2019 Wildlife & Scenery gallery. And remember that you can order prints of nearly any of these images directly via this website.
Puma photos from this trip will be published next week!
Want to join me on a quest for pumas, wildlife and the mountain scenery of southern Chile? I will probably lead this tour again in 2021 or ’22. Learn more here.
