Journey through Colombia and Ecuador, 225 
above. The animals had apparently been dead for some days, 
but, with the exception of the eyes, no part of them had been 
eaten. The grass around was completely worn away by the 
feet of so many great birds. The shepherds told us that 
the Condors sometimes sit round the bodies for several 
days before they begin the feast. They commence to eat 
them under the tail, and thence pull all the entrails out. 
I think that Dr. Sharpe (Cat. B. i. p. 21) is right in naming 
a second species of Condor fromEcnador >S^. cequatorialis ; but 
the brown variety is larger than the white-winged kind, and 
not smaller, as Orton supposed. The smaller brown indi- 
viduals would be the young of both kinds. The first brown 
examples that we saw were on the " pdramo " of San Gabriel, 
near the Colombian frontier, and were of ordinary size ; I 
took them to be the young of the ordinary Condor. But 
on Pichincha, and at other places south of Quito, we occa- 
sionally saw other brown specimens,which at once struck us 
by their extraordinary size. I mentioned this to Mr. Soder- 
strom, and he said that he always took the brown bird to be 
the larger. He said that they chiefly inhabited the region 
around Chimborazo. I found that the natives distinguished 
them by the name of " Buitre Cafe," and shepherds at dif- 
ferent places on the Eastern Andes all agreed that when adult 
they were larger than and not so common as the others. 
Whymper, in his splendid work on the Great Andes of 
the Equator, states that he never saw Condors flying higher 
than an altitude of 18,000 feet. He certainly had more 
opportunities of forming a correct opinion than anyone else 
I know of, and, so far as my experience went, I quite agree 
with him. 
The Indians who live in the high mountains often catch 
Condors by digging a hole in the ground sufficiently large 
for a man to hide in, over which they place a cow's hide, 
leaving only a small part uncovered down one side. Near 
this they place the carcase or part of an animal, and the man 
in hiding secures the Condors by the legs as they settle. 
Still another way is to place a carcase in a fairly deep trench, 
from which the Condors are unable to take wing again. 
SER. Vlll. — VOL. II. cj 
