266 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946 
of the land itself, ornate as a design, and refreshingly different from 
the belligerent birds, beasts, and mythological fire-breathers that adorn 
the coats of arms of so many other nations. And the quetzal, no less 
than the soaring eagle and the rampant lion, has its appropriate legend 
to illustrate its nobility of spirit and reflect that of the people it rep- 
resents. Every Guatemalan will proudly tell you that the quetzal will 
die of a broken heart if deprived of freedom. I have heard of Hon- 
duran and Costa Rican quetzals that survived considerable periods 
of captivity; but I sincerely hope that none hatched on Guatemalan 
soil will ever be guilty of conduct so unworthy of the national tra- 
ditions. It always makes us sad when an ugly experiment bears wit- 
ness against a beautiful legend. 
The quetzal is something more than the living representative of a 
beautiful country of the present era; its human associations stretch 
back into antiquity. Possibly no other feathered being of this hemi- 
sphere, the bald eagle and the turkey not excepted, has a longer 
history, as the philologist rather than the naturalist would use the 
term. This history is largely unwritten; and it is to be hoped that 
before long one who is at once an archeologist and an ornithologist 
will make good the deficiency. Still, Salvin and Godman, in the 
“Biologia Centrali-Americana,” have given us some glimpse of its 
antique importance. The long, waving green plumes of the male 
quetzal’s train were coveted objects of adornment of the Indian 
chieftains, as one may plainly see on many a modern restoration of 
ancient scenes. ‘Their use was limited by law to royalty and the 
nobility. The male quetzals were captured alive—it is stated with 
corn, as bait, which I rather doubt—and after being despoiled of their 
proudest ornaments, released that they might grow them afresh and 
continue to propagate their kind. Thus the brown aborigine, later 
so despised and crushed into the dust, proved himself more far-sighted 
than the white invaders who overcame him. The bird was described 
by some of the early historians of the Conquest; but it soon grew so 
rare in all the more accessible portions of the Spanish Kingdom of 
Guatemala that its very existence came to be doubted in Europe, some 
ornithologists even classing it among the birds of fable. In the nine- 
teenth century, it was rediscovered by Europeans; and soon its skins 
began to flow across the Atlantic for museums and the cabinets of 
collectors. This nefarious trade reached such proportions that the 
quetzals might well have been exterminated had not so many of them 
dwelt in wild mountainous regions which even today are most difficult 
of access and scarcely explored. Most of these trade-skins originated 
in the Alta Vera Paz in Guatemala. 
One other legend about the quetzal seems worth repeating here, espe- 
cially as it had much to do with fomenting my own desire to study the 
