Puma, Torres Del Paine National Park, ChileJust back from my journey to the bottom of South America. And quite a journey it was, starting with the fact that my flight was cancelled and rebooked five times just a few days before I was scheduled to depart — this courtesy of a prolonged, day-to-day crew strike on Latam Airlines. It was looking like I’d have to cancel the trip altogether, but I was finally able to find alternate flights on other airlines, albeit with multiple lengthy layovers. But I finally made it there and Chilean Patagonia with its spectacular Torres Del Paine National Park did not disappoint. And this despite the fact that of my roughly 140 hours in the park, it rained and sleeted and gale force winded for about 135 of them. But that didn’t stop my search for pumas. And the glorious few breaks in the weather had a knack for showing up at precisely the same time the pumas did. All in, I saw eight cats — a mother with three cubs and four solitary females. This young female was the second of my sightings, but the first I was able to get a good look at. It was the very end of a frustrating and very wet first day in the park and the light was fading fast. We scrambled blindly up a hill per the radio-signaled instructions of our excellent tracker, who was on an adjacent hill and monitoring the action from above. All I saw was black bush everywhere (that’s literally the common name for all that dark scrub surrounding the puma — Mata negra — black bush in Spanish). For the life of me I couldn’t see what my guide was telling me was 20 yards in front of me. And then she nervously popped up, regarded us for about ten seconds before disappearing in the other direction. Being a new cat to the tracker and appearing a bit scared, we decided to let her go without any further pursuit. Artistically, this isn’t the best photo of my trip, but it was my first decent shot of a puma in the wild and I love that sweet look on her face. You know… sweet for the most lethal predator in Patagonia.
Nikon D500 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 400mm) ISO 2500, f/4 at 1/160th of a second