9 August 2010

As promised, a blog about the animals in Fray Jorge!!! First and foremost, of course, were the degus that we were trapping and studying while staying at the park. For an awesome explanation of the actual work we did, see Rachel's blog on the subject. Degus are the cutest!

However, everyone had been telling us about an animal called the abrocoma (or chinchilla rat) that was the calmest wild animal ever, (plus really cute!),

so everyday we were hoping to catch one of those as well. About the second week at Fray Jorge we were lucky enough to catch one!! And Rachel, Tina, and I spent about 30 minutes holding it and taking photos. It was definitely the calmest wild animal I have ever seen, it would just sit in our hands and let us pet it and cuddle it! Pretty much the best thing ever!

One of the last days we were trapping we managed to catch a number of different things, including degus, some birds, a small mouse, and a nother rodent which we couldn't identify. At the time we thought it was just a small mammal that we were unfamiliar with, it looked a bit like a mix between a

degu and an abrocoma, and we just took some

photos and let it go. However, after showing the photos to a number of people, we still aren't really sure what it was, so we call it the "degrocoma" (degu + abrocoma). It was bigger than a degu or abrocoma and it had huge ears that were flat against its head. Anyone have any ideas?

Another thing that we were really excited about (of course)

were the guanacos!! They are wild ungulates related to llamas and are somewhat elusive. Many visitors to the park do not see any guanacos, as there are only two small groups of them along with a few solitary individuals. So lucky people that we were, we saw guanacos all of the time!!! One of the first times we saw the guanacos close up, they were across the valley from us at our study site, and two of them actually ran across the valley towards us! So exciting! After that we made jokes about the guanacos planning attacks against us, until Juan told us that guanacos have actually attacked people. Then I was a little

more wary of them...

Other than that we saw lots of zorro (foxes),

other birds, and lizards, including this one that lived under our house!