These women are bringing Darwin’s rheas back to Chilean Patagonia

PATAGONIA NATIONAL PARK — Chile. Mongabay traveled to Chile’s Patagonia National Park to follow a women-led team on a mission to bring 13 Darwin’s rheas back to the wild in April 2026.Working with Rewilding Chile Foundation, these dedicated rangers care for the birds around the clock, facing harsh weather, predators like pumas, illegal livestock grazing, and other threats to the park’s fragile ecosystem.For more than a century, the Chacabuco Valley, where the park is located, was dominated by sheep and cattle ranching. Fences fragmented the vast Patagonian steppes and rheas (Rhea pennata) nearly disappeared.But one of South America’s most ambitious rewilding efforts is helping to turn the tide.Tompkins Conservation, the organization behind Rewilding Chile, acquired former ranchlands and began removing thousands of kilometers of fencing, allowing native wildlife to reclaim the landscape.Now, the team is preparing for another milestone: Releasing 13 Darwin’s rheas into the wild.Mongabay followed the rangers in the days leading up to the release, documenting their preparations, the challenges they faced, and their determination to give these birds the best possible chance of survival.Will they succeed? Watch the video to find out.Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to you. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process—get in touch with us here!Banner image: Darwin’s rheas. ©Romi Castagnino. TranscriptNotice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.No, this one. There it is. Over here! Chick! Over here. I’ve been working for Patagonia National Park, more specifically in the Rheas Reproduction Center for 10 years. This release will be the third release of the year. It’s a process that takes practically an entire year of work. Here, they go through about two months of acclimation before they can be released. We also live in a landscape where pumas are the main predator. We’re always making sure they don’t get into the corrals. This kind of fence also has an angle that reduces the possibility of a puma crossing it by jumping. We make sure the animals which are being released are in the best possible condition. Good nutrition, good body condition. Come on, baby. There you go. One, two, three, four. Can you see that shed? There are rheas behind it. Six. They are animals that constantly walk in search of food, they move around a lot and have large home ranges. At first, we installed it [the camera trap] because of the rheas. This is a passage where we see chicks year after year. It went the other way. The other one has more feathers. A chick! There were surveys estimating a very small number, only around 11 to 15 individuals. When I arrived in 2016, you simply didn’t see many rheas. For me, the rhea is the gardener of the steppe. We’ve found many different seeds in their droppings. This shows us they’re excellent seed dispersers. We believe their role is extremely important. for restoring the steppe. We’ve seen more chicks over the years. More interactions between guanacos and rheas. More natural dynamics returning. Fences are still a major problem because they don’t affect only rheas. These changes take time. After more than a century of ranching, you can’t expect people to understand that the park has to be protected in just 10, 20 years. Our biggest concerns are the environmental conditions on release day. We’re in an area where winds are very strong. And we have drastic temperature changes. If the wind remains like this, we might release them over there close to the guanacos. The rheas share a lot with the guanacos. Let’s use the largest one. Look, the first one, the largest one. We get stressed about stressing them. We don’t want to harm them when we put them in the transport boxes. As a science teacher, we thought it was very important for students to come visit a National Park, where conservation actions as powerful as a release are carried out. The lid is small. You raise the first one. And then you take the second one off. Three, two, one. Go. It was a very emotional moment. It was super calm. They’re eating. The animals were super calm. We immediately saw them grazing, eating, and for us, that’s a very good sign. They explored and are already kilometers and kilometers away. Releasing wildlife is an emotion you can’t really explain. You feel it from deep inside. What matters most to them is the group, not the individual. I think that’s an important lesson for us as humans who have always believed ourselves to be so superior.