A Condor's Quill 



By FRANK M. CHAPMAN 



WHEN I see a woman wearing a Condor's quill, I wonder if she ever 

 thinks of the bird it once helped to soar far above the Andes through 

 the dome of the sky. And I wonder, too, what unfortunate chain of 

 circumstances has brought this noble plume from the top of a mountain to the 

 side of a bonnet ! I shall rarely, if ever, know whether the broad pinion raises 

 the mind that lies so near (and yet alas ! so far !) to it to flights in the realm 

 of fancy; but I have lately learned how the majestic bird that bore it was 

 sacrificed to the demands of a fashion which threatens its kind with 

 extermination. 



It was in Mendoza, Argentina, that on a recent journey to South America I 

 met a man who, by profession, is a hunter of Condors. We have all heard of 

 elephant hunters, seal hunters and bear hunters, we know only too well the 

 work of the plume-hunter, and I once met a man who was a hunter of iguanas, 

 but never had I supposed that so useful and inoffensive a creature as the Condor 

 would become some man's special quarry. Its flesh is not edible, for it is one 

 of nature's scavengers and feeds upon carrion; its plumage is neither bright in 

 color nor dainty in form ; but fashion has set a price upon its great wing- and 

 tail-feathers, and not even the remote canons and great altitudes of the moun- 

 tains in which it lives can give it sanctuary. 



For years, this Mendoza hunter has relentlessly pursued the Condor in the 

 Argentine Andes. Some he has shot, more he has trapped, and others he has 

 bought. The total number of these magnificent birds for whose destruction he 

 is responsible he told me, with the matter of fact air of one giving crop statis- 

 tics, is 16,000! 



As a result of this one man's persecution, the Condor is now a compara- 

 tively rare bird throughout an area over two thousand miles in length, and it 

 was admitted that further killing would practically exterminate it in western 

 Argentina. 



Only the wing- and tail-quills have a commercial value, and consequently 

 these alone are saved. They number usually eighty-four, and for these eighty- 

 four feathers, the equivalent of one Condor, the price paid prior to the war, was 

 twenty dollars. All shipments were made to dealers in Paris. The present 

 price is ten dollars, a sum which we may be thankful is too low to tempt our 

 Mendoza collector. With a fine show of feeling and an evidently vague con- 

 ception of the ethics involved, he exclaimed dramatically: 'T refuse to exter- 

 minate such a wonderful bird for so small a sum!" 



So here are the two ends of the chain which is dragging the poor Condor to 

 its doom — Miss Blank of the Center of Civihzation and the Hunter of the Heart 

 of the Andes. Who is to blame? We all know Miss Blank. She may be just 

 as tender-hearted as she is innocent of intentional wrong-doing; quite proba- 



(5) 



