LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NATURALIST. PART II. CREAT as have been the advan tages of menageries, in bringing immediately under the eyes of every observer animals which would otherwise be hardly known, except from books, or from their remains preserved in museums, they have, it must be confessed, been fatal to romance. The exaggerated proportions which travellers have assigned to birds and beasts-ay, and men-partly from seeing the objects at a distance, and partly from the highlycoloured and, in many instances, imperfectly understood accounts of the natives, shrink when the living creature is before the spectator. In such cases truth-like the best pictures of the Italian masters, which are not satisfactory at first, especially to those who have admired the extravagances, however poetical, of a Fuseli-looks poorly; and it is only after consideration that the mind becomes reconciled to the light, before which errors and false pretensions vanish. of which have been given in their attempts to continue the species notwithstanding their unfavourable situation. In a state of nature the eggs of the condor are said to rest on the rock, without stick or straw, and unprotected by any border. There, at an elevation of from ten to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, on such ledges and plateaux as 'The Condor's Look-out,' The Condor's Nest,' 'The Condor's Roost,' the nestling first breathes the highlyrarified air. A year elapses, it is asserted, before the downy young one is sufficiently plumed to leave the mother. About the end of the second year the colour is a yellowish brown, and, up to this time, the gollila or ruff is not visible, whence probably arises the notion that there are two species of condors, one black (the colour of the adult), and one brown. Flying to a more lofty pitch than any other bird, and reduced in the sight of the upward gazer, amid the grand and gigantic scenery, to the size of hawks, they wheel round, keeping their telescopic eyes on the valleys, watching for the fall of some failing horse or cow. Then down come the condors to the feast. In their daintiness they generally begin with the tongue and the eyes, but the rage of a hunger sharpened by days of watching on the wing, in the eager air of a very high altitude, is not easily appeased. The bird, rioting in the midst of the plentiful table which death has spread for it in the wilderness, after tearing up the hide with its trenchant beak, carves out and swallows gobbet after gobbet till it is so gorged as to be unable to raise itself on the wing. This the Indians well know, and when they have a mind for a battue they set forth a dead horse or cow and quietly watch the progress of the repast, which is sure to be attended by the condors, some of them being almost always on their watch far aloft. When they are well gorged, and looking on each other with gluttonous gravity, the Indians make their appearance with the appear to enjoy good health, proofs deadly lasso. Then comes a scene of How many who have read of the condor till he has been almost magnified into the roc of Arabian story, have been disappointed at the first sight of those birds which have been kept so long at the garden of the Zoological Society of London! I can hardly call to mind one who has so seen them in my presence whose expectations had not gone far beyond what he then saw. To say nothing of more general romantic statements, eighteen feet have been given as the actual measurement across the expanded wings of the great vulture of the Andes. The old male belonging to the society, a very fine specimen, measures eleven feet from tip to tip when his wings are outstretched; his length does not exceed four feet nine inches. Both he and his partner, notwithstanding their confinement-a confinement which must be peculiarly irksome and unnatural to a bird, the greater portion of whose free life is spent on the wing, sailing in the higher regions of the atmosphere, far above the throne of clouds of the Giant of the western star, excitement, gladdening the heart of the sportsman only a degree less than the stimulating bull-fight. The lassos are thrown with more or less success. Some are fast, others contrive to scramble away but when a condor is caught there is a fight, and a stout one, before it is killed; and indeed the stories told of its tenacity of life would be incredible were they not attested by trustworthy witnesses. Humboldt shall be called to make out a strong case. He was present when the Indians tried to overcome the vitality of one which they had taken alive. Having strangled it with a lasso, they hanged it on a tree, pulling it forcibly by the feet for several minutes, in a manner that would have done credit to Mr. Calcraft and his assistants. The execution being apparently over, the lasso was removed: the bird got up, and walked about as if nothing had happened. A pistol was then fired at it, the man who fired standing within less than four paces. Three balls hit the living mark, wounding it in the neck, chest, and abdomen: the bird kept its legs. A fourth ball broke its thigh. Then the condor fell, but it did not die of its wounds till half an hour had elapsed. This bird was preserved by M. Bonpland. Such direct and unimpeachable evidence should make us pause before we hastily discredit the accounts of older writers. Ulloa was thought to have used a traveller's privilege when he asserted, that in the colder localities of Peru the condor is so closely protected by its feathery armour, that eight or ten balls might be heard to strike without penetrating, or, at least, bringing down the bird. Not that we give credence to the stories of the condors carrying off children- indeed the evidence is against such a statement; and still less do we believe the accounts of their attacking men and women. At all events, Sir Francis Head has proved that a Cornish miner is a match for one of these great vultures. Humboldt allows that two of them would be dangerous foes when opposed to one man; but he frequently came within ten or twelve feet of the rock on which three or four of them were perched, and they never offered to molest him. Indeed the Alpine lämmergeyer, the Phenè of Aristotle and Ælian, is little inferior, if not equal to the condor in size, and like the condor haunts great mountain-chains. As the condor is the great vulture of the New World, this vulture-eagle holds its throne on the lofty precipices of the old continent. On the Swiss and German Alps, from Piedmont to Dalmatia, in the Pyrenees, in the mountains of Ghilan and Siberia, of Egypt and Abyssinia, this, the largest of the European birds of prey, is on the watch to scourge the country. With more of the eagle than the vulture in its composition, and with claws more fit for rapine than the nails of the condor, it generally seeks for a living prey, and, soaring with its mate above the hills and valleys, pounces upon the lambs and other quadrupeds. The stories of its having carried off children in its crooked talons wear a much greater air of probability than such tales when applied to the condor, with its comparatively impotent foot. The strength of the lämmergeyer and its conformation are quite equal to such murderous acts; for a full-grown one is four feet from beak to tail, and nine or ten in alar extent. the lämmergeyer contents itself with a dead prey when no better may be had, and Bruce gives an anecdote of its pertinacity and audacity on one of these occasions so graphically, that it would be unjust to the reader to give it in other than the slandered Abyssinian traveller's own words : But Upon the highest top of the mountain Lamalmon, while my servants were refreshing themselves from that toilsome, rugged ascent, and enjoying the pleasure of a most delightful climate, eating their dinner in the outer air, with several large dishes of boiled goat's flesh before them, this enemy, as he turned out to be to them, appeared suddenly. He did not stoop rapidly from a height, but came flying slowly along the ground, and sat down close to the meat, within the ring the men had made round it. A great shout, or rather cry of distress, called me to the place. I saw the eagle stand for a minute, as if to recollect himself, while the servants ran for their lances and * Gypäetus barbatus, Storr. shields. I walked up as near to him as I had time to do. His attention was fully fixed upon the flesh. I saw him put his foot into the pan, where was a large piece in water, prepared for boiling; but finding the smart which he had not expected, he withdrew it, and forsook this piece which he held. There were two large pieces, a leg and a shoulder, lying upon a wooden platter; into these he trussed both his claws, and carried them off; but I thought he looked wistfully at the large piece which remained in the warm water. Away he went slowly along the ground as he had come. The face of the cliff over which criminals are thrown took him from our sight. The Mahometans that drove the asses, who had suffered from the hyæna, were much alarmed, and assured me of his return. My servants, on the other hand, very unwillingly expected him, and thought he had already more than his share. As I had myself a desire of more intimate acquaintance with him, I loaded a rifle gun with ball and sat down close to the platter by the meat. It was not many minutes before he came, and a prodigious shout was raised by my attendants, He is coming! he is coming!' enough to have discouraged a less courageous animal. Whether he was not quite so hungry as at first, or suspected something from my appearance, I know not, but he made a small turn and sat down about ten yards from me, the pan with the meat being between me and him. As the field was clear before me, and I did not know but his next move might bring him opposite to one of my people, and so that he might actually get the rest of the meat and make off, I shot him with the ball through the middle of his body, about two inches below the wing, so that he lay down upon the grass without a single flutter. Bruce gives the following dimensions of this daring bird : From wing to wing he was eight feet four inches; from the tip of his tail to the point of his beak, when dead, four feet seven inches; he weighed twentytwo pounds, and was very full of flesh. But return we to our condor. It affords pregnant evidence of the care and attention exerted by the authorities and keepers of the animals confined in the garden of the Zoological Society of London in the Regent's Park, when we find that so many of them have not only shewn a disposition to breed in their captivity, but that not a few have actually reared healthy offspring under all the disadvantages which a life so different from that intended by Nature must, under any circumstances, produce. Some of these instances, if our notes find favour in your eye, dear reader, will be hereafter given. At present we beg attention to one where, with every wish to continue the species, the parents seemed to give up incubation as hopeless. At the time the present note was taken the female condor in the Regent's Park had laid seven eggs. The first was laid on the 4th of March, 1844; the second on the 29th of April of the same year; the third on the 28th of February, 1845; the fourth on the 24th of April in that year; the fifth on the 8th of February, 1846; the sixth on the 3d of April, 1846; and the seventh on the 7th of May, 1847. On one occasion I saw the condors with a newly-laid white egg, some three or four inches long, lying on the naked floor of their prison. There was no appearance of a nest of any kind, and there was something melancholy and yet ludicrous in the hopeless expression with which both the parents looked down at it. They regarded the egg and then each other, as if they would have said if they could, What are we to do with it now we have got it?' And the mute mutual answer of their forlorn eyes and dejected heads was, evidently, Nothing.' Well, at last it was proposed that as soon as another egg was laid it should be placed under a hen. Accordingly, on the 7th of May, at half-past seven o'clock, A.M. (I must be pardoned for being somewhat particular on such an occasion), the newly-laid egg was put under a good motherly-looking nurse of the Dorking breed, and as the colours of hens as well as of horses are worthy of note, let it be remembered that her colour was white inclining to buff. The place of incubation was a cage elevated some distance above the floor in one of the aviaries. The hen sat very close. Day after day, week after week, passed away; still_the excellent nurse continued to sit. Day after day, week after week again rolled on, and the usual period at which the anxious feathered mother beholds her natural offspring was left far behind. Still the good nurse sat on, till at last, after an incubation of fifty-four days, the young condor, on the 30th of June, 1846, about six o'clock in the morning, began to break the wall of its procreant prison. The process of hatching was very slow. The young bird was not extricated from the egg until after twenty-seven hours, nor was it then released-on the morning of the 1st of July-without the assistance of the keeper, who found it necessary to remove the shell, as the membrane had got dry round the nestling. Thus came into this best of all possible worlds the first condor hatched in England. It had an odd appearance, and seemed to wonder how it had got here. The head appeared to be misshapen, for on the top of it was what looked like an amorphous bladder of water contained between the external skin and the skull. This gradually disappeared, and when I first saw it, on the same 1st of July, about four o'clock in the afternoon, the head was properly shaped. It was naked, and of a dark lead colour; and such was the hue of the just visible comb (showing that it was a male), and of the naked feet. With these exceptions the young bird was covered with a dirty white down, and looked healthy and vigorous. On the evening of the day on which it was hatched it ate part of the liver of a young rabbit. The young condor was fed five times each day with the fleshy parts of young rabbits; at each feed a piece about the size of a walnut was given, and it was very fond of the liver. For the first ten days it was fed, and after that time it pecked the food from the hand of the keeper. It took no water, nor was any forced on it. I find, also, the following in my note-book : July 18.-The young condor continues to thrive apace, and the good hen that hatched the egg from which this portentous chick sprung still remains in the elevated cage, and seems very much attached to her charge. When feeding-for which purpose she quits the nestling only twice aday, hurrying back as if anxious to resume her duty-she is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words) till her hasty meals are ended. The young condor's down is now changed to a more grey hue, and the germs of the true feathers begin to show themselves. The head and neck have become blacker, and the budding excrescence of the comb advances. The upper mandible of the bill is slightly moveable. The lower extremities are become darker and very stout, but as yet too weak to support the bird's weight. May not this local, but no doubt natural weakness, point to the solution of the continued close attention of the hen? Her duty with her own eggs is to hatch chickens that run very soon after they have left the egg-shell, but till they are strong enough to be able to trust to their lower extremities she keeps them close, hiving them,' as the old wives say, carefully, till these lower extremities, which arc, in the nestlings of the gallinaceous tribe, first well developed, shall be sufficiently strong to carry them in search of food and out of danger. The hen, in this instance, finds that her Garagantua of a chick cannot walk, and therefore goes on cherishing it and sitting close over it. I saw it fed about three o'clock in the afternoon upon part of a young rabbit, nearly the whole of which it had consumed in the course of yesterday and to-day. When brought out it shivered its callow wings and opened its mouth like other nestlings, but it then uttered no cry. It made much use of the tongue in taking the food and in deglutition. On my return from making these observations I went to look at the old condors. Military bands were playing, and the wind was very high. Both birds were very much excited, the male especially. He spread and flapped his wings, pursuing the female, as she walked backwards from him, with his beak opposite and close to hers, and gesticulating vehemently and oddly. The next entry is a sad one : July 21, 1846.-The young condor, after thriving well to all appearance, died this morning. The good hen, which had been most attentive to it to the last, seemed to miss it much. The cry of the young condor resembled the squeak of a rat, and the dwelling-place of the hen and her charge was infested by those predacious rodents. Sometimes they would squeak, and then the bereaved foster-mother would approach the hole whence the squeak proceeded, listen, and abide there clucking, as if in hope of seeing her charge come forth. In this case I was struck with the modification of instinct, or rather of the adjunct of something closely resembling a reasoning power, on the part of the hen. In general, as soon as the days of her incubation are fulfilled the hen leaves the nest, if the eggs are addled, or have not been hatched from some other cause. But here she continued to sit more than double the usual time without moving except for the purpose of taking food. Might it not be that she felt that life was in progress under her, and that her arogyn (storge) prevailed with her not to abandon the embryo till the fulness of its time was come? * Again I observed that she made no attempt to solicit the young condor to feed, as hens do with their own chickens. She seemed to regard it as something incomprehensible, but belonging to her; and looked on with evident complacency when the keeper took it out to feed it on raw flesh, receiving it, after its meal, under her wings with a comforting cluck. It is a well-known aphorism that the more perfect the order of the animal is, the larger is the size of its offspring when it first enters into life. Thus, as John Hunter observes, a new-born quadruped is nearer to the size of the parents than a bird just hatched, and a bird nearer than a fish. Something may be, therefore, attributed to the disproportioned bulk of the young condor; but true as the maxim is, it does not follow that the parent has the power of distinguishing size. In birds such a power probably does not exist; for we know that the hedge-sparrow and other small birds will go on feeding the enormous young cuckoo till the poor benevolent dupes are almost exhausted, before and after the intruder has shouldered out their own eggs and little nestlings. The sight of the helpless young condor could not fail to raise reflections in the most unobserving. There was the comparatively minute form, which, if its life had been spared, would have been developed to gigantic proportions; and that little, feeble, plumeless wing, was formed to bear quill-feathers from two to three feet in length. These noble quills are used as pens in the Cordillera; and in this country I have seen them transformed into floats for the angler, of a size and finish to satisfy the most fastidious dandy disciple of good honest Izaak Walton. Two other raptorial birds come into the group, though one of them, the Californian vulture, wants the caruncle which distinguishes the condor. The other is the King of the vultures. The brilliant colours of the head and neck of this last project it upon the notice of the visitor who *We cannot but admire with Harvey,' says Willughby, 6 some of these natural instincts of birds, viz. that almost all hen-birds should, with such diligence and patience, sit upon their nests night and day for a long time together, macerating and almost starving themselves to death; that they should expose themselves to such dangers in defence of their eggs; and if, being constrained, they sometimes leave them a little while, with such earnestness hasten back to them and cover them. Ducks and geese, while they are absent for a little while, diligently cover up their eggs with straw. With what courage and magnanimity do even the most cowardly birds defend their eggs, which sometimes are subventaneous and addle, or not their own, or even artificial ones. Stupendious in truth is the love of birds to a dull and lifeless egg, and which is not likely with the least profit or pleasure to recompense so great pains and care. Who can but admire the passionate affection, or rather fury, of a clocking hen, which cannot be extinguished unless she be drenched in cold water? During this impetus of mind she neglects all things, and, as if she were in a frenzy, lets down her wings, and bristles up her feathers, and walks up and down reckless and querulous, puts other hens off their nests, searching everywhere for eggs to sit upon; neither doth she give over till she hath either found eggs to sit or chickens to bring up; which she doth with wonderful zeal and passion, call together, cherish, feed, and defend. What a pretty ridiculous spectacle is it to see a hen following a bastard brood of young ducklings (which she hath hatched for her own) swimming in the water? How she often compasses the place, sometimes venturing in, not without danger, as far as she can wade, and calls upon them, using all her art and industry to allure them to her.' † Or, King Vulture-Sarcoramphus Papa-Vultur Papa, Linn. |