Page:Hunting and trapping stories; a book for boys (IA huntingtrappings00pric).pdf/137

 There is no more wonderful and mysterious bird than the American Condor. Of all the feathered folk it is the largest in stretch of wings, with one exception and that is the giant albatross.

It is the largest of the land birds, its wings from tip to tip usually measuring between ten and fourteen feet.

The condor lives in the Andes mountains of South America and may be said to belong to the vulture family.

The condor prefers to live at great heights where a man could not exist. It builds no nest but lays a solitary egg upon a narrow ledge on the face of an inaccessable precipice. The condor thinks nothing of flying as high as twenty thousand feet; in fact it is most frequently found on the edge of the snow line which in itself seldom creeps below fifteen thousand feet. It will fly for hours at a time in great circles, sometimes a mile in circumference without flapping its wings at all. The condor is not the sort of bird that has to feed every day but when the opportunity occurs it gorges itself and then goes away to digest the meal.

The cattlemen wage continuous war on this mighty vulture for it commits great havoc among their flocks, especially the sheep. When carrion is to be found in abundance the condors do not worry the domestic animals but should their supply run short they descend in bands of half a dozen or more to the valleys in search of prey.

Now the most natural way of ridding any place of theives of this character is by the gun, trap or poison. But the condor is exceedingly difficult to kill. In the first place no trap that was ever made would hold a condor, unless it was of such clumsy dimensions that the bird would not go near it. If the trap is staked to the ground it would brake the chain. Poison is no better for the bird's digestion is marvellous. If it eats poison meat it will eject it at once before it can do any harm. The gun is almost useless too for the vitality of this vulture is enormous. An explorer in South America records that he shot a condor fourteen times before he succeeded in killing it. Among the sheep herders cartridges are scarce and expensive while on the other hand condors are large and numerous.

A great writer on natural history tells a story of a man he met while travelling in Chili who showed him some of the outer pinion feathers, nearly two feet long, which he had taken from a condor's wing. This man killed a mule in a secluded part of a valley where he thought condors would be likely to come, and sure enough in a day or two a flock appeared. They gorged themselves on the carcase to their utmost extent. One huge fellow in