An Encounter with a Pudu in Southern Chile

Pudus are the smallest of deers. In 15 visits to southern Chile (where they live) over a period of 34 years, I had never encountered one. Then on Friday 29th December 2023, I (with wife Cristina and her sister Patti) finally saw the one shown below, nibbling the roadside grass between Petrohué and Ensenada, where the lower flanks of Volcán Osorno meet the Rio Petrohué between the Llanquihue and Todos Los Santos lakes. The area lies within the Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park. It took a moment to process - "Wow, that is a pudu."


The southern pudu (Pudu puda)


These southern pudus (Pudu puda) live in a beautiful green landscape of temperate forests between lakes and fast-running rivers with snow-capped volcanoes towering above. They are generally very shy and hardly ever seen. They prefer mature Nothofagus dombeyi (commonly known as coihue) forest, with a dense understory dominated by Chusquea quila, commonly known as quila.


View showing three volcanoes (Calbuco lower left, Osorno upper centre and Puntiagudo upper right) and two lakes (Llanquihue at left, Todos Los Santos at right). The pudu encounter took place on the lower slopes on the south side of Volcan Osorno, approximately in the centre of this image. There's a 15 km scale at lower left.



On this day, there were superb views of three stratovolcanoes: Osorno, Calbuco and Puntiagudo, as shown below. Osorno has the classic Fuji shape. Calbuco is a bit more ragged and was the most recent to erupt (April 2015). Puntiagado, as its name indicates, is a very pointy volcano with steep slopes.


Volcán Osorno, forest and rapids in the Petrohué River


Volcán Osorno and forest with notro flowers and buzzing hummingbirds


Volcán Puntiagudo


View over Lago Llanquihue to Volcán Calbuco from Mirador Del Bosque on the flanks of Volcán Osorno.


There were also foxes, far from shy, becoming quite habituated to humans. The pictures below were taken in the Mirador del Bosque on the flanks of Volcán  Osorno.






I have enjoyed this spectacular landscape over many years, but to encounter a pudu in the wild is very rare indeed and I will long treasure this stroke of luck.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stone axes from the highlands of Papua New Guinea

Image
The story of first contact in 1933 with the peoples of the central Wahgi Valley in the Papuan highlands is a remarkable one. An unsuspected group of thriving stone-age cultures came to the attention of the outside world when the Leahy brothers first flew over the area and later reached it on foot. Tribal men carried elaborate stone axes and this contact with extant stone-age cultures provided fascinating insights on how their stone tools, such as axes and adzes were hafted. The available evidence was collated in Burton's (1984) Thesis at the Australia National University, on "AXE MAKERS OF THE WAHGI: Pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands." I saw a number of these old axes during a visit to the highlands near Mount Hagen in October 2018 (see the Paiya chief photograph below). The area of that journey is shown in the google Earth image shown below. The upper Wahgi River valley with locations of Paiya Village, Mount Giluwe and Mount Hagen t
Read more

A Merovingian Croix Ancrée Tremissis, Sutton Hoo, and Declining Gold Content in the 7th Century Coinage

Image
In the recent Netflix film "The Dig" there is a scene in which Basil Brown's character shows a small gold coin, known as a tremissis, to Edith Pretty, confirming that the ship burial at Sutton Hoo is of Anglo Saxon age as he had previously suspected. A Merovingian tremissis found in Kent, 10 mm across 37 such coins, all from Merovingian Francia, were found at Sutton Hoo, associated with the remains of an elaborate purse. These coins have commanded a great deal of attention as a potential means to constrain the date of the burial. This is a highly imprecise process (the coins are not datable to within a range shorter than 16 years), relying on recognising issues associated with known rulers, identifying the youngest of these, speculating from there as to how much younger the undated coins may be, and then how much later the assembled group was deposited in the ship burial. Plan of  the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 burial chamber in Burger et al (2016), combined from versions by Phil
Read more

From Nike, Winged Goddess of Victory, to an Angel in Three Coins

Image
A winged goddess of victory has been a widespread image over the past two and a half millennia. Here I illustrate her transformation from Greek goddess to Roman goddess to Christian angel with three coins spanning a period of about 900 years.  She, Nike , appears in Archaic form in a statue from Delos , dating to the 6th century BCE and found in front of the old Temple of Artemis in 1887. A famous 5th century BCE sculpture of Nike by Paionios was found at Olympia in 1875 and the even more famous Winged Victory of Samothrace , dating to the second century BCE, was found in 1863. Nike also appeared on coins and a beautiful ancient Greek example from the fourth century BCE shows this winged goddess of victory carrying a wreath and a naval stylis (what appears to be a staff with angled trident head).   Reverse of gold stater of Alexander III (The Great), Ake mint, dating to 308/9 BCE, showing Nike with wreath in right hand and stylis in left hand. In her later Roman guise as the goddess
Read more