36 THE AUDUBON BULLETIN 
though he worked far into the night. Somehow, at odd moments, he 
made field sketches which in the aggregate were very many, but they 
were largely for recording the fugitive colors of soft and unfeathered 
parts, which are altered in the preserved specimen. For the rest, he 
depended upon the genius of his uncanny faculty for retaining vividly 
impressions of those intimate “‘spiritual’”’ qualities which gave each 
bird he painted its own distinctive “personal” character. 
In the field, as elsewhere, Fuertes showed an extraordinary combina- 
tion of qualities, at times almost paradoxical. Always as eager as a child, 
he was often as sentimental as a debutante and as sympathetic as a 
mother; yet he was full of a stern virility which continually manifested 
itself in ways that left no doubt he was a man’s man. With gun in hand 
he was a hunter and collector, having no qualms at the shedding of 
blood, but with a freshly killed bird before him he would sometimes sit 
stroking its teathers in a detached ecstasy, purring and crooning over it 
in a manner that in another might have seemed ridiculous. On the trail, 
the sight of a new bird might cause him to abandon in a flash all practical 
considerations, his own safety or comfort, plans for the day, and hopes 
for the morrow. Yet that night in camp, it would be Fuertes who spent 
an hour of his precious time repairing ingeniously and most practically, 
for someone else, broken saddle gear, guns, typewriters or cameras. Pure 
beauty in all things fascinated him, and the exquisite combinations of 
color and texture exhibited by many small birds were his constant joy, 
but it is significant that his favorites among all birds were the falcons, 
the swiftest, boldest, most dashing and, withal, the most rapacious and 
inexorably bloodthirsty of their kind. 
In Abyssinia, Fuertes found himself in a veritable terra incognita, an 
ornithological world which was all new to him, and he plunged into it 
with an exuberance of joy. Every bird was an adventure and every 
moment an opportunity. Patience he had at the skinning table and the 
drawing board, but at other times it was not always evident and in his 
impetuosity he was occasionally near to disaster. His first day in Africa 
was in Djibouti on the coast of the Red Sea and, while others made 
necessary arrangements for progress inland or sipped cool drinks on the 
hotel veranda, he slipped out of the settlement, dodging local gendarmes 
and in the sweltering heat collected seventeen birds which were skinned 
with penknives that night in the hotel. The next day on the train, after 
it had crossed the Abyssinian border but before customs regulations 
had been complied with, he was tantalized by unknown birds seen at a 
distance. Finally, at a small station, over the heads of a gaping and 
jabbering crowd of Abyssinians, a beautiful blue roller alighted on the 
telephone wire and Fuertes could stand it no longer, but dove into his 
luggage for a small shot pistol and started out of the standing train 
intent on having the bird in his hands, come what might. It required 
the combined efforts of the four other members of the party with argument 
