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Updated: June 25, 2025
We passed, as we rode along, several bodies of horses and men; and as we approached the trees, Ithulpo shouting with all his might, several condors rose slowly on the wing, and a huge tiger stalked slowly away, looking round every now and then at us with an angry glance, for having disturbed him at his repast.
Some condors were soaring round the rocky peaks, and the landscape, though well clothed with vegetation, had a weird, dreary character of its own, partly due to the quantity of large cacti that grew in every nook and corner, singly, or in groups of ten or twelve, to the height of twenty or thirty feet.
When an animal is killed by the sportsman in a lonely valley, may he not all the while be watched from above by the sharp-sighted bird? And will not the manner of its descend proclaim throughout the district to the whole family of carrion-feeders, that their prey is at hand? When the condors are wheeling in a flock round and round any spot, their flight is beautiful.
That would have done well enough if he could only get near them; but the condors were sufficiently shy not to let any man within reach either with bolas or guns. It is only when they have been feasting on carrion, and have gorged themselves to repletion, that they can be thus approached, and then they may be even knocked over with sticks. At other times the condor is a shy and wary bird.
"You see, mates, it won't do to leave the work for the morning, for before that time the condors, the jaguars, and the pumas will be down upon him, and tear every scrap of meat from his bones," he remarked. "I wish he had been rather farther off, for the beasts will keep up such a concert that we shan't be able to sleep much more to-night."
A flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses.
Sir F. Head says that a Gaucho in the Pampas, upon merely seeing some condors wheeling in the air, cried "A lion!" I could never myself meet with any one who pretended to such powers of discrimination. It is asserted that if a puma has once been betrayed by thus watching the carcass, and has then been hunted, it never resumes this habit; but that having gorged itself, it wanders far away.
If the condors glide down, and then suddenly all rise together, the Chileno knows that it is the puma which, watching the carcass, has sprung out to drive away the robbers. Besides feeding on carrion, the condors frequently attack young goats and lambs; and the shepherd-dogs are trained, whenever they pass over, to run out, and looking upwards to bark violently.
I noticed that several hours before any one of the condors died, all the lice, with which it was infested, crawled to the outside feathers. I was assured that this always happens. London's Magazine of Nat. Hist., vol. vii. From accounts published since our voyage, and more especially from several interesting letters from Capt.
A number of condors were kept captive in a garden, secured by ropes. Wrapping up a piece of meat in white paper, and holding it in his hand, he walked up and down in front of the birds; but they took no notice of it. He then threw it down in front of an old male bird; but it was still disregarded.
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