The Alerce Trees of Pumalin

 A man goes looking for the oldest living trees on the planet. He finds them in Chilean Patagonia and gradually buys up the area around these trees. Over the years this private property covers an area covering of over 3000 square km!

Initially it was a private nature reserve of Doug Tompkins, the founder of North Face, and his wife, Kris, the former CEO of Patagonia brand of hiking gear. Following Doug's death in 2015, the entire property (and a bit more) was donated to the Chilean government. This is is now the largest national park in South America.

And the tree that the Tompkins were trying to protect? It is called the Alerce in Chile. A conifer of the cypress family, some of them are over 4000 years old! 

This amazing amazing nugget turned up in a DW documentary titled, "Carretera Austral" about the ambitious road that Chile has been trying to build across the length of the country, connecting a swathe of fjords and islands that line up on its western coastline facing the Pacific Ocean.

Some DW documentaries are quite amazing. The first one I saw was titled, "Iran from Above - In the Mountains", and provided a glimpse into a beautiful country that gets in the current political milieu. Highly recommended! :)

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REFERENCES & LINKS

• Alerce - Patagonian Cypress
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carretera_Austral

Patagonian Worms

There has just been a shoot-out in the FIFA World Cup. Brazil has squeaked past Chile in a tournament that is now almost completely dominated by the South Americans.

Over the past few days, my mind too has been dominated by a book on the same region -- Bruce Chatwin's classic 1977 travelogue: In Patagonia.

It is the sort of book that makes you want to take the first available ship across the oceans to the "New World". The book begins with one man's quest for fossils and prehistoric civilizations but soon
swerves into the  age in which migrants, pirates, gold-hunters and farmers - most of them fleeing Europe - dislodged and decimated the Indians to make themselves home in a cold, hostile region.

The story of John Davis, in particular, caught my attention. He was the captain of a bunch of mutineers, abroad a ship called the "Desire". Off the coast of Patagonia (now S. Argentina and S. Chile), he came came across an island full of Jackass Penguins. The crewimmediately set about clubbing more than 20,000 of these penguins to death.

Davis and his comrades then stuffed as many of these carcases as possible into into their ship's hold and set sail again. As they approached the warm tropics, certain worms appeared from the decaying penguin flesh.

"There was nothing they did not devour," wrote Davis. "They destroyed shoes, clothing and then they began to eat the ship's timbers, threatening to gnaw through the sides. The more we laboured to kill them, the more they increased. At last we could not sleep for them; they would eat our flesh and bite like mosquitoes."

Out of a crew of 75 men, just 16 managed to reach Ireland.

What were these maggots or worms? has anybody studied them?

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REFERENCES

Miller, Mara (): DRESSED TO KILL

Wiki -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Patagonia

Life of John Davis -- http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/A_Life_of_John_Davis_the_Navigator_1550-1605_Discoverer_of_Davis_1000694547/313

Patagonia - A Cultural History -- English Mariners: Cavendish, Davis and Byron -- Google Books