The story of how Chile’s greatest puma hunter became a puma protector, was one I’d heard countless times in Torres del Paine over the last couple of years. His skills were the stuff of legend, and even the most experienced puma trackers I met at lodges would smile and shake their heads in disbelief when talking about him. But whenever I tried to meet him, he seemed harder to track down than the animals he’d spent his life following.
Finally, after months of planning, he not only agreed to meet me, but be part of a film I was making for Swoop about the age-old conflict between livestock farmers and predators, and how he became involved in a conservation project finding a way for pumas and ranchers to live together.
Life on an estancia
The ranch at Estancia Cerro Guido is vast. It runs around 19,000 head of sheep over nearly a quarter of a million acres, wedged in between the edge of Torres del Paine National Park and Chile’s border with Argentina. While it operates today as a luxury lodge for visitors, sheep ranching remains at the core of its existence as it has since it was founded more than a century ago.
The sheep graze on the wide open steppe, under the watchful gaze of the national park’s famous granite towers. Unfortunately for the ranchers, they’re also watched by pumas. The land around Cerro Guido isn’t rich in guanacos, puma’s natural prey, but it’s an important corridor for pumas to transit through on their way to their preferred hunting grounds. This is good for tourists who want to go puma tracking, but a challenge for the estancia who want to keep their livestock safe. This is where the puma hunters—called leoneros—traditionally come in. but Cerro Guido is taking a different approach.
Enter the hunter
As Mirko Utrovicich stretches forward to shake hands with me, he looks like an advert for a Patagonia found in history books. We’re at Cerro Guido’s sheep-shearing shed – a natural habitat for someone who spent most of his six decades as a rancher. His weather-beaten face is topped with a boina, the traditional felt beret beloved of gauchos, and his pipe is never far from his mouth. He’s the sort of person you would instantly trust in the wilderness.
Mirko was raised in sheep farming and handled guns at an early age. Spending time with his herds, alone on horseback in the wilderness, he soon discovered a natural talent for reading the landscape and the signs of the wildlife that he was sharing space with. He rhapsodised about the birds, the guanacos and even the culpeo foxes that would surprise in the undergrowth.
It was a talent that the other guides rhapsodised about. One experienced tracker grinned in bafflement when he told me how Mirko could read the landscape, taking a marking on a bush or a broken twig and using it to tell the whole story of what had happened in the area. But it was a skill that Mirko had always used to wage war against pumas.
‘Pumas are hated by farmers, and anyone who has any connection with livestock,’ he told me frankly. In a single night, a puma might kill 15 or 20 sheep in a flock, far more than it could ever eat but financially crippling for small farms. The solution was obvious. Hunting pumas in Chile has been illegal since the 1980s, but on Patagonia’s ranches this amounted to paper protection only. Every estancia would employ a leonero to kill pumas and Mirko was universally regarded as the best.
Gone to the dogs
Cerro Guido has been pioneering an alternative conservation approach that would allow them to continue ranching while also working to protect the wildlife on its land. Getting Mirko on board has been essential to its success. The shaggy white sheepdog at his side when we met was part of the team. Ranchers have always worked with sheepdogs, but this one was something new, an outsized Italian breed called a Maremmano, bred in the Alps to protect flocks from wolves.
The pups are raised alongside the sheep to integrate them into the herd and live alongside them. Pumas have little fear of traditional Patagonian sheep dogs, but are afraid of the maremmas. As Mirko scratched his dog behind its ears, it was hard to see it as anything fearsome, but their presence alone seems to act as a deterrent for the big cats.
‘Pumas hate them, but they are intelligent creatures,’ he told me. ‘The dogs prevent them from entering the area with sheep, and they move back towards their natural prey [of guanacos].
Hunter turned tracker
Mirko admitted that he had been a skeptic when Cerro Guido first approached him. ‘I thought I’d go to see what they were doing for a while, and then I’ll go back to what I always do.’ Smiling, he added, ‘But it turned out I liked it.’ Now Mirko has retired his gun, and divides his time between the sheep and taking guests out on puma tracking excursions. I was keen to join him.
The next morning I was up before dawn in the passenger seat of Mirko’s four-wheel-drive, waiting for the sun to break over the horizon while he scanned the landscape with binoculars. This is the time of day when the pumas are on the move.
As we drove slowly along the track, Mirko would stop every now and then to look at the bushes, then disappear for a moment while he followed some imperceptible sign. When he returned, he beckoned me out to look at a scratch mark, or spot on the ground, explaining that this was where a puma had marked its territory, or passed through just an hour ago. As he explained the animal’s behaviour, the faintest scuff marks resolved themselves into pawprints, and a patch of slightly flattened leaves revealed its secrets.
I would never have noticed them in a million years, but I could understand why the other guides spoke of him in such awed tones. Some puma trackers use heat-sensing binoculars to help pick out pumas lying up in the brush, but for Mirko this seemed like cheating. Why rely on technology when the landscape itself told you everything you needed to know?
He found our puma of course. She was magnificent, tucked into the bushes and surveying her realm with a lazy yawn. We watched for an hour before she moved on, possibly with thoughts of lunch on her mind. But one thing was clear: sheep wouldn’t be on the menu. The maremma dogs would make sure she gave any flocks a very wide berth.
On the drive back to the estancia, Mirko explained the challenges for the future. The dogs worked, he explained, but they were expensive. He was concerned that the smaller, poorer farms wouldn’t be able to afford them, and they would still look to older methods to protect their livestock. There was also a cultural aspect—the deep-rooted belief that sheep and pumas can’t coexist—and the fact that the puma we’d just seen might easily cross the border into Argentina, where hunting is still permitted.
‘It’s difficult, but we’re just getting started,’ he said, expressing sympathy for farmers who continued to struggle with the financial cost of living with pumas. ‘People do it because the times demand it.’
Reflecting on his own journey from hunter to conservationist, he concluded with the simplest of observations: ‘Killing is not a condition of being human.’ The path ahead was clear, even if it might not be easy. But as the sun got higher behind the granite towers of Torres del Paine, I was sure of one thing: if Patagonia’s most celebrated puma hunter can put down his rifle, there’s hope to be found in this contested landscape.
*
