Sydney Porter—Notes from South America



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it was evening and my fine male Roseate Spoonbill was dead, my

Screamers almost dead, and so were my Rheas. It was terrible. I did

everything I could when I got over to the ship, but four of the Screamers

died, as did three of the Rheas. The other birds were almost at their

last gasp. The only excuse the agent was able to offer was that he

expected something might happen ! !


The surviver of the Screamers, a young bird, managed to come

round after being hand-fed for a long time on tender lettuce. It was

almost too weak to eat this and we had very little of it on board as I

had previously ordered a quantity of cabbages ; I thought the bird

would eat this, but it refused it and no amount of subterfuge, such as

chopping the lettuce and cabbage up finely, would make it. At the next

port of call, which happened to be Rio Grande do Sul again, there was a

rush to the local market to procure lettuce for the remaining bird which

was by now consuming about twenty large ones or fifty small ones a

day ! At each port my chief objective was lettuce ; I must have used

hundreds ; at all events I got the bird home all right but later on when

it was turned into the garden it ate some poisonous plants and died ;

so all my labour was in vain. Later on one of the officers of the ship

brought me another male bird back with him on his next trip, this was

very tame but unfortunately it got into a nearby allotment garden,

where the owner beat it to death, his excuse being that he thought it

was a wild bird and wanted killing ! Later, he was fined five shillings

at the local police court, where the magistrates look upon cruelty as a

very minor offence, hardly worth bothering about. So it seems as though

I was fated to never possess these birds.


To get back to Buenos Aires, one of the features of the Zoo is the

Condors’ aviary, certainly the most colossal structure ever built for an

aviary. It makes the bird of prey aviaries at the London Zoo look

like canary cages ! It must be about sixty feet or more high and is

roughly four hundred or five hundred feet in circumference. Here, one

saw, besides a whole flock of Condors which could perform their aerial

activities with ease, dozens of other birds of prey including many

Caracaras of which there were several albino examples and very lovely

they looked. There were also the two species of Turkey Vultures and

Chillean Sea Eagles, etc. In the centre of the aviary was a huge rock



