GUANACO, gwa-nafk6 (Sp., from the South American name huanaco, huanaca). The larger of the two wild species of the camel family in habiting South America, of which the llama and alpaca are domesticated varieties. This animal (Lama guanaco) has more the appearance of a hornless goat-antelope than of a camel. Its back is flat and straight, its legs in fair pro portion, its head small and neat, with long, pointed, expressive ears, and its tail reduced to a bushy stump. A full-grown male stands about four feet high at the shoulder, and is covered with a thick coat of long, almost woolly hair, pale reddish iu color, and longest and palest on the under parts. Domestication and artificial breeding with reference to the improvement of this coat has produced the alpaca (q.v.).
The guanaco is distributed throughout South America wherever a temperate climate exists. It inhabits the valleys of the Andes as far north as Bolivia and Ecuador, in ,company with the vicunias (the other species of the genus, Lama vicunia), and there has habits very similar to its mountain-keeping relatives; but on the plains of Patagonia it ranges to the shores of the Atlantic and of Magellan's Straits, and moves about in herds. The pairing season comes in August and September, and the young are born in May and June. They feed upon the pungent herbage of the Patagonian deserts, as well as upon the bitter grasses of the Pampas, and furnish to the wandering natives their principal flesh food, and the only skins useful for clothing or tent-making, except those of the rheas. The
Gauchos hunt them extensively also, and they form the principal prey of the puma, so that they take the place in South America of the antelopes of other plains regions. The guanaco also occurs on Tierra del Fuego and neighboring islands, and swims readily from one to the other. Over a large part of its habitat none but salt water is to be had, and this it drinks read ily. One very curious circumstance in its history is its habit of resorting to certain places in river valleys when it feels ill, so that nearly all which die a natural death seem to do so at these spots. This has been plausibly explained as due to the influence of an instinct inherited from the time when the country was much colder, and whenever storms or other distress afflicted the animals, they were accustomed to seek a covert in the bushes which grew only alongside the sunken streams. Consult: Tschudi, Reisen (lurch (Leipzig, 1866-69) ; Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage (London, 1860) ; Cun ningham, Natural History of the Straits of Magellan (London, 1871) ; Hudson, The Natu ralist in La Plata (London, 1892) ; Spears, Gold Diggings of Cape Horn (New York, 1895). See LLAMA; VICUNIA; Plate of CAMELS AND LLAMAS.