Eyes over the Chilean Andes

Jorge Valenzuela, with the National Forest Corporation of Chile, and I have been checking our cameras in the Chilean Andes in recent weeks as part of his wildlife monitoring program. We have so far checked eight camera locations. We recorded Andean Cat, Pampas Cat, puma, culpeo (fox), Hog-nosed Skunk, Grison, Mountain Viscacha and Mountain Caracara in our camera traps. We observed rhea (nandu or Surire) with a group of babies and vicunas, but did not record them because our cameras are in the mountains, not the plains. We also used a drone to take pictures of the landscape that is truly immense and nearly treeless, except for the highest living trees on Earth, Polylepis tarapacana (or Queñoa de Altura). We also observed on the drone three species of flamingo-Andean, Chilean and James-living and nesting in Salar de Surire at 14,150 ft.

Enjoy the drone footage:

Jim Sanderson

Jim Sanderson is GWC’s program manager of Wild Cat Conservation. Jim received a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1976. He is the founder and director of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation, a member of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, a review board member of the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, and a fellow of Wildlife Conservation Network.

Originally published on December 6, 2017.

Related posts:

semua acara berjalan sangat lancar, banyak permainan yang dimainkan bahkan ada beberapa perlombaan yang diadakan. sampai waktu malam tiba, seluruh anak kelas X dan XI sudah pulang ke rumah…

We all want our portfolios to grow to meet our long-term financial goals, but most of all we want the path to be smooth and not provide significant bouts of anxiety along the way. The financial…

My conflict was not that I was last; it was how far behind I tended to be. Most of the times when I finished running, usually about three minutes after the last person, I had to dash into the…