Osara.org

I am motivated by the resilience of these mosses. They refuse to be simple, while they journey through long periods of time. This trail will bring attention to them and they will bring attention to this island. Be careful of our foot steps!

Like our environment, we were chaotic. With limited resources, time and energy, our directions became malleable. It is very easy to construct trails and signs if one was to construct a plan, liberally purchase materials, and construct with no deviation from the schematics. This is not our intention, we are creating a trail through natural energy, mixing together to form attention and respect. Our hope is that this will increase the harmony between humans and the ecosystem within which we live.

Five years ago was my first visit to Navarino Island. My proposed purpose was to aid Christopher Anderson as his biological technician. It was during this work, he brought to my attention the Omora Park and its uniqueness. When Chris and I where not working on his investigation of the North American beaver, as an invasive species, we worked in the park. It was then when I began cutting the materials, designing, and digging the footings for the first wooden bridges in the Miniature Forest.

Now, I have returned to help implement the Moss Garden that will be a first of its kind to help promote the conservation and sustainable use of the “Miniature Forests” of Cape Horn. I collaborated with Jessica Fernandoy on different ideas pertaining to the construction of the hand lens and bridges. Cristóbal, Pancha and I hunted for the elusive cooper to make the “handlens” sculptures to highlight the mosses. We found most of it hiding in the metal recycling center. Then we purchased the best tools that we could afford and locate in Punta Arenas. I boarded the ferry with plans, concepts, tools, materials, and most importantly passion.

Arriving in Puerto Williams in October, I was ready for major construction, but as one would understand if they have had the experience of living in Puerto Williams, this was not going to happen for at least a month, but nonetheless Ximena, Randy, and I began to work out a means to get the primary trails ready for the season. Finally, in the beginning of November more focus was applied towards the Miniature Forest. I began working with the cooper sculptures, experimenting with different techniques to form the letters and found pounding them into the thin cooper sheets to be difficult. If we could press them in, this would be ideal, unfortunately the facilities for this are expensive and unavailable at this moment. I used Jessica’s design of a wiggling stem and incorporated it with Ricardo’s preference, which was to have it move across the ground. Station number one and two now have # signs made out of copper, and numerous different hand lenses have also been constructed and they all live happily together in the small house at the beginning of the Park.

I can’t wait to come back in February, and I look forward to hearing what visitors think about the work done to date in the Moss Garden. Take care everyone, and I’ll be thinking of y’all while I teach sailing in the Caribbean!

Love and peace, Bryan

I’ve been back home in Seattle for a couple months now, and I’m starting to adjust back to speaking English and the idea of autumn in November. I imagine that spring must be starting to creep in down south on Isla Navarino, and as much as I am enjoying the coffee and civilization here, part of me wishes that I could be there to see it.

I spent the end of 2006 on the island assisting with the University of North Texas writing course. They spent a few weeks rampaging around Puerto Williams and its environs, journals in hand, had lectures on Darwin at the top of mountains, ate limpets, and read Shakespeare to each other for hours in the forest. Despite the limpets and a two night backpacking trip, none of the students or instructors perished and we celebrated New Years with a bonfire on the shores of the Beagle Channel.

After the UNT course flew back to Texas and things got back to as normal as they ever get that close to Cape Horn, I left for a few weeks to explore Torres del Paine and then came back to Navarino for a few more months of fickle weather and birds. Rina Charlin and I continued mist netting every month, and in February and March we were able to band birds at another site a ways up the coast from town as well. We caught several hummingbirds at that site in March, which was extremely cool. Also in March I began to work seriously on a paper about the autecology of the fío-fío, which has now been accepted by the Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia. I also continued volunteering with Elke monitoring goose and duck nests on the coast, which was not only scientifically valuable but also lots of fun as we often came upon nests full of fluffy chicks or eggs in the process of hatching. Elke also traps and tags mink in the summer, but I seemed to act as a bad luck charm as the traps remained mink free whenever I checked traps with her.

Towards the end of March I hiked the five day circuit through the Dientes, Navarino’s mountain chain, and miraculously managed not to kill myself or even get (very) lost. It was pretty spectacular, what with the views of Cape Horn and the vividly colored fall foliage and jagged mountain peaks. Rina and I also took a day trip on the monthly ferry to Puerto Toro, which is the world’s southernmost permanent settlement and consists of fewer than forty people who are in turn almost outnumbered by fishing boats. We went there to distribute some of the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve calendars produced by Omora, and had quite a successful day.

And then, finally, as all things must come to an end, I left the island and Omora in mid April on the overnight ferry to Punta Arenas, travelling through the most remote and beautiful landscapes I have ever seen, and after a few more months of shiftless wandering I made my way back home.

–Clare

I arrived in the country a little over a month ago, flying from Quito to Punta Arenas, and, following a brief stint in Tierra del Fuego, have since been volunteering for Omora on Isla Navarino, in sub-antarctic Chile. I plan to be here for five or six months.

My arrival in Punta Arenas coincided with Dr. Christopher Anderson’s trip to Karukinka, a wildlife reserve in Tierra del Fuego owned by the Wildlife Conservation Society, so I went along. We spent about five days tramping around in peat bogs and lenga forests and up the sides of mountains collecting water samples from streams, lakes, and beaver ponds in order to evaluate the impact of invasive beavers on aquatic invertebrate diversity. Being late spring in southern Chile, the weather was wildly erratic, featuring hail, snow, wind, rain, and brilliant sunshine, not infrequently all in the same day.

Beavers were introduced into Tierra del Fuego for the fur trade in the 1940s, and have spent the intervening years generally wreaking havoc on the native forests. Their dams flood the surrounding area, drowning the roots of the trees, over time creating a patch of waterlogged ground and still standing, dead, decaying snags. These patches, scattered over the landscape, are clearly visible from the air.

I flew to Puerto Williams, my home for the next several months, on the 7th of November, riding in a tiny little plane over what I have heard are breathtaking views of Patagonia, the mountains, glaciers, etc. We, however, were enshrouded in a clouds almost the entire flight, so these allegedly majestic vistas remain to me a subject of myth. Puerto Williams is very, very small, a town of about 2,500 people on Isla Navarino, just across the Beagle Channel from Argentina. Easily more than half of the inhabitants are families with the Chilean Armada, only posted here for a few years, so the actual, permanent population is smaller yet.

A group of three bryologists arrived a couple days after I did to work on Tayloria, a genera of moss in the family Splachnaceae that grows obligately on animal feces and emits unpleasant odors from its mature sporophytes in order to attract spore-dispersing flies. I spent the next several days with them and two students from the University of Magallanes looking for moss populations in the Parque Omora and in local peat bogs. There are three species of Tayloria reported on the island, of which we were only able to find two, one, T. mirabilis, which grows in the lenga-coigue forests, and the other, which grows in the sphagnum bogs. The U. Magallanes students continued working with the moss after the bryologists headed back north, both trapping the flies attracted to the moss for identification and analysis and working on a study of the moss phenology.

Other than that, I’ve mostly been involved with birds. Omora spends six days every month banding birds caught in mist nets at two sites in the Parque Omora, one site in so for a week in November I left the house every morning at five with Rina, the research assistant, in order to open the nets by six. We band the birds, and then measure and weigh them before releasing them. Omora has amassed about 6,500 capture records over the last six years of regular banding.

The Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, based at the University of Chile, has a couple hundred nest boxes in and around the park in order to study rayaditos (Aphrastura spinicauda). I worked for a couple days with two researchers from Santiago, banding and taking blood from the nestlings and parents, and running exploration and predation experiments with the adult birds. The data can be compared with similar data collected in Chiloe and Tierra del Fuego, in order to evaluate latitudinal differences in nesting behavior.

I’ve also spent a fair amount of time with Elke Schuttler, a PhD student studying the impact of invasive mink, a very recent arrival to the island, on ground nesting birds. She locates and monitors the nests of several species of coastal birds, as well as placing artificial nests, in order to observe predation and the impacts of that predation on native birds. We put out 150 artificial nests early last week, at six sites, and five days later ninety percent of them had been predated. The sites on rocky coasts seemed to have a much higher rate of predation by mink rather than native birds of prey such as caracaras. This is possibly significant considering that the number of kelp geese (Chloephaga hybrida), a species which nests obligately on rocky coasts, seems to be decreasing.

Yours, Clare

I have just finished my work in P. Williams and returned to P. Arenas to work for a few days. Last weekend we went camping with my friend Rigo and caught a lot of trout. They were delicious. I have attached photos of my prize fish. We also caught another native fish that lived in the lake (and now lives in formalin) - so that was very exciting. I hope all else is well and I will see you soon!

I have great news. We went fishing this past weekend to Lago Pollollo with Rigo and encountered another species, Aplochiton zebra (in Wulaia we found A. tenatius). If you need info on these fish try fishbase.org. That’s really exciting because they seemed to be living happily with the trout which Bob McDowell (osmeriform expert) didn’t expect. Also, puye seem to be a plenty on the island. So I don’t think you have to worry to much about the trout - but there were definitely more puye on Hoste (2500 in one reach of 100 m long and 3 m wide - I’m serious on that one.) We did a site at Puerto Inutil - no fish, but we did see some puye in the coast and the fishermen caught some robalo with gill nets while we were working, Wulaia - only puye and A. tenatius, Douglas (2 sites) - puye, rainbow and brown trout, 2 sites on Murray Channel - one had no fish and one had puye and small browns and 3 sites at Kanasaca - one had 2500 puye, and the other two had less puye and brown trout.

By the way, the puye do seem to like beavers - the sites with the most puye have a beaver pond just upstream. So there’s lots interesting going on. We’ve done about 22 sites and have 3 left - if the weather is good. Oh one more interesting thing - we went upstream of the dam at Robalo today - no fish - we sampled both sites. Probably due to the dam.

Un abrazo,
Michelle

I hope all is well in the United States. I have just gotten back for an awesome trip collecting fish in the Murray Channel and on Isla Hoste. I have attached some photos, but don’t worry I have tons more. At one site, we came across a different species (I’ve attached a photo for the fish nerds) which was very exciting and at another sites we caught over 2500 galaxiids in 100 meters of river - the native fish - and the river was less then 2 meters wide. We were counting fish until 12:00 at night. We also had an asado one night with various fishing boats - which was a wild experience - cooking the freshly killed lamb over the fire and then devouring it with our hands afterwards. And one of the fishermen happened to be the cousin of another scientists I have worked with here in Omora. How strange to be at the end of the world - at an estancia in the middle of nowhere and run into another person who knows one of the 15 people I know in Chile - raro! (Although they probably thought it was strange there is a gringo in the middle of nowhere shocking fish in rivers). Well I hope everyone has a good week.

Un abrazo para todos,
Michelle

I hope all is well in the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve been working hard down here on the other end of the world and catching lots of fish. I’ve attached some pictures so you can see me at work (and at play - I went on a great hike the other day). Friday I leave for a week to go sample the western and southern part of Isla Navarino and Isla Hoste - I am really excited to go back to the glaciers another time. If the weather keeps up, it will be an incredible trip. So four of us (myself, Paul (my helper) and two fishermen (Ricardo and one yet to be named) will pile into a fishing boat for a week. It should be an adventure. I will definitely send pictures when I get back. Have a good week!

It is really exciting to be here on Isla navarino studying fish and the relationship between the native and exotic species. We have started sampling streams on the island and we are already seeing a dichotomous distribution between the presence of the natives and the presence of exotics. It appears that the introduced trout has eradicated the presence of the native galaxiid (G. maculaus) in most streams, but there are some streams dominated by galaxiids where only a few small trout are present. This is exciting to see and I look forward to sampling many more sites to find out what environmental mechanisms are related to this distribution. I´ll keep you posted.

Talk to you soon,
Michelle

Hi everyone,

I hope this email finds you well and in better weather. It has been cold and rainy due to a low pressure system off Cape Horn since I have arrived. Luckily the work we are doing at the moment doesn’t require nice weather (although sun always makes for a better day in the field). I heard it has been very nice in North Carolina - how funny is that.

Otherwise, all is well. I knew when I was flying over the Cordillera Darwin, looking out at the majestic glaciers and mountains that I was really lucky to be back. I also had good luck in the technician I hired, he is very enthusiastic, hard working, and speaks english (a plus since my spanish is only so so). So hopefully both of our second languages will improve by the end of the month. There is a good group of scientists working here now - most are studying the introduced mink and birds- so it is wonderful because we can all learn from each others work. In fact, I have my first fish without electrofishing - my coworkers found some galaxiids swimming in a lake the other day and brought me a sample and I found mink tracks and Carpinteros (Magallenic woodpeckers) and took photos and GPS points for them. It is nice because we all help each other out.

I forgot to bring photos with me on my pen drive today, but I will send a photo next week - maybe after we catch some fish.

Have a good week, Michelle

So I absolutely loved South America, and the research ended up great. 36 out of the 60 artificial nests that I put out were depredated, and 17 out of the 36 nests were depredated by the mink. Most of the nests that were depredated by the mink were nests placed close to either the Beagle Channel or to Robalo River.

Travelling with Will and Amy was a blast, you couldnt ask for two more wonderful people, who made sure I didnt remain sleeping on the bus, or who didnt allow the bus to leave me when I didnt make it back on in time after bus stops. We were able to see so much in a small amount of time: the rainforest in Pucon and a mountain bike excursion I will never forget, Patagonia, El Calafate and the glacier, bus strike in Bariloche, prostitutes in Puerto Montt, giant sea lions and an empanada thanksgiving in Valdivia, gringito park in Santiago, being broke in the desert, and a wonderful end to the trip in Buenos Aires. All in all I could not have asked for anything more during my entire time in Puerto Williams or travelling. Thank you so much Ricardo and Pancha for allowing me to do research and all of your support, Chirs for making all of this possible, and Steve for helping me out so much with my project. I hope to go back to Puerto Williams in the near future and do more research on the mink and its effect on the native birds.

The little town of peurto williams is treating us like kings…and queens respectively. The weather has been good, the people have been extremely kind and friendly, the supermarket lady is incredibly helpful, our fishin´buddy just had a birthday party which was quite a treat, and the street dogs are as cuddly as ever. Research is going well as we are wrapping things up…working on writing the introduction and methods for our research theses, as the results and discussion will be added next semester. Going on a big (relatively)camping trip this weekend to the south side of navarino island…should be a nice change from the everyday hustle and bustle of a town of 2000 people…perhaps.

Hope halloween was fun back home…don´t worry, no crazy costumes, but i had my fill of candy in honor of the day…

ciao my friends, william

Hello everyone. Chile is still as amazing as ever and as each day passes I think of how much I will miss this place when I leave. The mountains are amazing and as spring approaches each day they become more vibrant with color. My stream samples are going well, despite the random snow storms we have had the past few days. I must admit, for a Georgia girl I am handling the snow quite well. All is well at the end of the earth…it is everything one can imagine and more. Nos vemos.

-Amy

Things have been great here on the south side of the world. Everything is progressing as could have been expected…not to say that there aren´t countless new experiences in our adventures…but all is well. All of our research projects are in full gear…although, i sometimes get a little frustrated with mine…but i love it none the less…and it is progressing quite nicely. Amy and Brett´s research projects are working to perfection…we are planning a camping trip soon to finish up the rest of Amy´s sampling. The weather has been interesting…somedays snow and wind and rain, and somedays tranquil and sunny…i enjoy the variety, and with no t.v., it is always a surprise…like christmas everyday…sort of. All the best to everyone…

Cheers, Will

Hello everyone. Chile is still as amazing as ever and as each day passes I think of how much I will miss this place when I leave. The mountains are amazing and as spring approaches each day they become more vibrant with color. My stream samples are going well, despite the random snow storms we have had the past few days. I must admit, for a Georgia girl I am handling the snow quite well. All is well at the end of the earth…it is everything one can imagine and more. Nos vemos.

-Amy