Guanaco Ataque!

In addition to adorable small mammals, Chile is home to some pretty awesome large ones as well! Most people have heard of llamas and alpacas, but their wild relatives, guanacos, still roam parts of South America. There are two families of them in Fray Jorge and we were really hoping to catch a glimpse of one of them. We spotted them on a hill a ways away one morning and felt really lucky. Little did we know...Morgan's awesome attack picture

Guanaco ataque! We were all on the hill doing telemetry one day, and a guanaco ran through our valley! It was so cool! We were just getting over how exciting it was, when the guanaco reappeared over the ridge in front of us, followed by another one- who was chasing it! They raced back through the valley, heading directly at us. I was standing with Morgan and Loren, and we all thought we were actually going to get run over. Which would have been terrible, but also kind of awesome! At the last minute, the guanacos changed their course and thundered past us.

As if this wasn't enough excitement, maybe half an hour later I spotted one guanaco about 15m from where Morgan and I were standing. It was near a big dead cactus looking into the valley behind us. It reared up twice, then trotted back through our degu valley and out of sight. Crazy guanacos!


After this we continued seeing guanacos pretty often, sometimes alone and sometimes a whole group. We liked to joke that the guanacos were stalking us and were going to attack, and the night before Tina, Morgan, and I spent the day alone in the field we were having our usual laughs about guanaco attacks, when Juan decided to tell us stories about the rogue guanaco that roamed the park years ago. This young male would sneak up on unsuspecting tourists and bite them or charge them! All of a sudden, guanaco attacks were not quite so funny to us. Luckily, we made it out of the park unscathed. Sneaky guanacos!