Patagonia is a place where everything seems to be produced on the most epic scale. It’s a place of huge landscapes, impossible mountain ranges and plains of pampas that seem to stretch out to the horizon forever. It can feel like small measures don’t exist here.
But maybe they should. On previous trips in Patagonia I’d tracked pumas in Torres del Paine, and watched condors wheel in the skies about. Now I wanted to slow things down and find a new way to discover Patagonia’s wildlife, in places that don’t yet see many tourists. Most of all, I wanted to see a pudu, the notoriously shy smallest deer in the world. But first I wanted to find one of the region’s tiniest and most unusual creatures, which takes its name from one of Patagonia’s most famous visitors. So I took the Darwin Trail, looking for the frog that gives its tadpoles the best childcare in the animal kingdom.
The lodge in the rainforest
My starting point was the Futangue Lodge, which sits in a private nature reserve on the southern edge of the Chilean Lake District. The landscape here is almost outrageously green, as it’s part of the Lake District biome called the Valdivian temperate rainforest. This is a place with enormous trees dripping with mosses, ferns and fungi. In terms of endemic species, it’s one of the most important biomes on the planet, as well as being one of its most important carbon sinks.
Futangue Lodge was born out of a conservation project to protect 13,000 hectares of pristine forest on the edge of the Puyehue volcano. Not that you’d know that there was even a volcano from your first look: its cone has collapsed into an enormous caldera, and its slopes are covered in a tangle of thick foliage. Within minutes of stepping out of your room, you find yourself on a series of trails that lead straight into the green heart of the reserve, where cooling hidden waterfalls and steaming geysers that erupt out of the ground remind you of Earth’s ancient power. It feels a lot like Jurassic Park – only the animal I was looking for was far, far smaller than any dinosaur.
Exploring rainforest trails
Everyone at Futangue seemed obsessed with Darwin’s frog. Amphibians are known in environmentalist circles as sentinel species as they’re particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Hearing the Futangue staff rave about them was a good sign of their desire to keep the entire local ecosystem healthy.
As soon as we started our hike, I wondered how on earth we would find them. The plant life is so riotously thick, that if we wanted to step off the trail we were immediately hit by a thick wall of green. Just maintaining the trails felt like it would be a life’s work – more than once I turned around expecting the forest behind me to have swallowed up the path. I’d been told that Darwin’s frog was barely the size of my thumbnail. How could we possibly find it?
The answer, my guide Felipe showed me, was to turn our walk into a microsafari. We moved slowly but deliberately, turning our focus on the ferns, moss, fungi and lichens of the forest. It was the most contemplative walk I’d taken in a long time, slowing everything down and beginning to connect with the forest.
Meeting Darwin’s frog
Very gently, Felipe used a stick to turn over the deep leaf litter on the ground as we moved forward. Before too long he bent down to look at something I couldn’t see, then out on a pair of latex gloves. A second later, he was holding a tiny jewelled frog with a curiously pointed snout in the palm of his hand. It was Darwin’s frog – first described for science by the famous naturalist during the voyage of the Beagle.
Initially, I was quite alarmed. The frog was lying on its belly with all four legs in the air. Was it dead? Should Felipe even have picked it up? I was assured that the frog was fine. The gloves were a biosecurity measure to avoid spreading pathogens (we similarly put our boots through a disinfectant footbath before starting our walk). And this ‘playing dead’ tactic was a natural behaviour: the frog’s bright belly was echoing a poisonous fungi also found in the forest, so it was telling us that it wasn’t good to eat.
We carefully put the frog back in the leaf litter where it belonged. Everything was beautifully damp for a frog, but this is one species that appears to have broken its reliance on open water for breeding. Females lay their eggs directly into the leaf litter, and once the tadpoles begin to develop, the males take them into their vocal sac to protect them, carrying them around for six weeks like a kangaroo with its joey, until the tadpoles have safely turned into froglets and are able to care for themselves.
In the great dense enormity of the rainforest, finding something so utterly extraordinary and tiny felt as exciting as any big game safari.
To Chiloé island
The second part of my wildlife quest took me to Chiloé island, a short boat ride from Puerto Montt, the main gateway by air to the Lake District. Chiloé barely sees a fraction of the visitors to Chile of those heading to Torres del Paine or even Aysen, but the moment I arrived I knew that it was somewhere I was going to enjoy.
Chiloé feels a lot like a part of Patagonia where they forgot to put the clocks forward for a few decades. In the fishing town of Castro, I stayed in the Sizigia Hotel, which was a converted palafito – one of the island’s traditional wooden stilt houses, built over the water so that their owners could tie up their boats outside their backdoors.
The west coast of Chiloé faces the Pacific Ocean, with crashing waves and windswept coasts. It didn’t seem like a good place to find a delicate creature like the pudu, so to take up its trail I took myself to Tepuhueico National Park, which is almost in the centre of the island.
Home for me was Tepuhueico Lodge – just like Futangue, another lodge tucked into a reserve surrounded by Valdivian temperate rainforest. The lodge looked something like a strange wooden lighthouse, with a grand tower growing out of its centre. In a nod to Chiloé’s traditional architecture, it was entirely covered in wooden shingles, giving it a pleasingly organic feeling.
Looking for pudu
As with Futangue, the nature experience started the moment you stepped out of your room. The landscape was a little more open here, with pockets of open areas breaking up the forest. And amazingly, my guide and I only walked for five minutes before we found a pudu, as if it had been waiting for us specially.
I’d heard about encounters like this. In Patagonia National Park, the staff in the lodge seem to delight in telling you that if only you’d been there this time yesterday you would have seen a puma strolling past the breakfast area. But here in Tepuhueico, I was having that exact experience – a female pudu munching on some giant rhubarb.
At least, it felt like the rhubarb was giant, because yes – this really was a tiny deer. It stood perhaps 40 cm (16 inches) at the shoulder. She didn’t seem to care that she was being watched, and kept happily chewing away as we sat down and I got my camera out as quietly as I could. We spent nearly an hour together, and at one point she was barely three metres away. I could see every russet hair on her head, not that she appeared to be bothered by me. Small, yes – but extremely confident. Eventually she decided that she’d had enough rhubarb for the moment and wandered into the undergrowth.
Close encounters
If we’d tried to track the pudu into the forest, it would have been an almost impossible effort. Tiny deer and big plants make for a difficult wildlife experience – just like Darwin’s frog. Unless you have the right guide of course, who knows the name of every plant, insect and animal you might encounter. This was the trick. My guide in Chiloé, Luis Felipe, knew exactly where pudus were likely to be found, even if he was as pleasantly surprised as me that ours showed itself so easily.
Later on that morning, as we stopped to admire the pink fuchsias that seemed to tumble into flower everywhere, he got his phone out and played the sound of a bird call. Within minutes, a little brown bird was hopping around our feet, rustling through the leaves looking for insects. It was a chucao – an iconic species of the Chilean forest, though I’d never seen one so close before. It quickly found a snack, skittered around for a few moments, then flitted into the trees, leaving us with big smiles on our faces.
This seemed to be the theme of my trip: taking the time to stop and be delighted by the smallest of moments and the tiniest of creatures. Patagonia’s big ticket wildlife might continue to draw the headlines, but this time around I was overjoyed to find so much pleasure in the smaller things in life.
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