Tango In Patagonia

On one remote windswept lakes near the tip of South America, the world’s rarest grebes have been given their own bodyguards

- Marianne Taylor

With their breasts pressed close, the dancers race and circle, never breaking eye contact through every switchback turn. Another couple dip, shimmy and plunge, spin away and rush back together. The sheer uninhibited exuberance of the dance captures the mood of the watchers, for whom being here today is a triumph of determination, endurance and hope.

Few birdwatchers have seen this spectacle, or ever will. Only discovered by science in 1974, hooded grebes breed on the remote, high-altitude, wind-torn plateaux of southern Patagonia. Reaching the habitat requires hours of slow 4x4 driving over the most unforgiving terrain, and an hour or more hiking. The winds scour the plateaux, blowing hard day and night, rarely dropping below 50kph.

This might as well be a moonscape. There is no cover or shelter. Even in summer, snow may fall and temperatures dip below freezing levels. The hooded grebes nest in colonies on small glacial lakes, but there are hundreds of lakes… and each year the colonies move.

Wildlife film-makers Michael and Paula Webster were invited to film the hooded grebes by Aves Argentinas, the Argentine partner of BirdLife International. They began their search in October 2016 alongside researchers and volunteers who were ready to settle in for the breeding season. It would be a tough journey.

“Once you leave the tarmac road, the field station is another eight hour’ drive away,” says Michael. “We visited several dozen lakes over several long days before finding any grebes. We were searching lakes where the team had found breeding grebes before, but many had dried out.”

FALLING IN LOVE

With reduced winter rain and snowfall, the lakes are shrinking. Climate change is the most intractable problem these Critically Endangered species face, but not the only one.