For some time their numbers have been decreasing, and we no longer see great troops of them as we used to do eighteen years ago. The cause of their diminution is certainly the bitter war waged against them by poachers. The parts of the marisma frequented by the wild camels lie between the Coto del Rey on the north, the Coto Doñana on the west, and the Guadalquivir on the south-east. The long deep channels of La Madre, however, interfere with their reaching the Coto Doñana, and they chiefly graze in the marismas of Hinojos and Almonte. The plan pursued by the poachers is as follows:—Coming down from some of the little villages, they cross the river in small flat-bottomed boats in which they can creep along the shores to points where they have seen either the spoor or the animals themselves during the day. Then drawing near to the camels, under cover of the waning light, they are able to kill one or sometimes two, which they skin and disembowel on the spot. The flesh is cut up into pieces, sewn up in the skin, and, on returning to the riverbank, secreted beneath the flat bottom-boards of the boat, thereby evading detection by Civil Guards and douaniers. The men then sail down the river and sell the meat at San Lucar as venison.
When in the marisma in 1892 I met one day a troop of forty animals—some old males, their huge bodies covered with thick hair like blankets; there were also females followed by their young—fantastic of appearance, owing to the disproportionate length of their legs, but galloping and frisking around their mothers as they had done since birth.
Next day my companion and I took lassoes; we encountered a huge old male, singly, which trotted and galloped round our horses, terrifying the poor beasts to such an extent that we could not come near the camel. At length after a fifty-minutes’ chase, in crossing a part where the mud was soft and the surface much broken up by cattle coming to drink, we overtook him. Thanks to my horse having less fear than the other, I was presently able to throw a lasso around the camel, my companion hauling taut the rope to hold the prisoner fast. The great brute proved very active, defending himself with his immense flat feet, which he used as clubs, and, moreover, he bit, and the bite of a camel is venomous. Ultimately I succeeded in getting a second rope around him and dragging him to the ground, where he lay like the domestic camel. The photographs illustrate this episode.
Old males frequently have the hair very ragged and scant, especially on hind-quarters, and on their knees are great callosities. The truly wild camels of the marisma are fast disappearing. A friend has furnished me with the approximate number now remaining absolutely wild, viz. fifteen or sixteen near La Macha fronting the Palace of Tisana, besides five enclosed in the Cerrado de Matas Gordas, near the Palacio del Rey, and belonging to Madame La Condesa de Paris.
It was owing to the rapid decrease in their numbers, and in order to save them from extinction, that the Condesa had these enclosures, known as Matas Gordas, prepared. They contain excellent pasturage, besides some extent of brushwood; yet the enclosed camels do not flourish, nor have they ever bred. Big as the enclosures are, yet the area may be too restricted for them; or it may be the disturbance due to the presence of cattle and herdsmen (since the cerrados are let for grazing) that explains this failure; or possibly the camels resent being enclosed at all. At any rate the spectacle of troops of camels rushing wildly forward in all directions is passing away all too quickly, and soon nothing but the legend will remain.
Truly it is melancholy that the wild camels should be allowed utterly to disappear, representing, as they do, so extraordinary a fact in zoological science.
Our friend Mr. William Garvey tells us that in the summer of 1907, while returning from Villamanrique, crossing the dry marisma in his automobile, he saw three camels. He drove towards them, and when at 500 or 600 yards, they turned and fled, he put on full speed (sixty miles an hour), and within some ten minutes had all three camels completely beaten, tongues hanging out, unable to go another yard!
This will be the first occasion when wild camels have been run down, in an open desert, by a motor-car!
February 9, 1903.—This morning, shortly after daybreak, a big single bull camel passed my “hide” in the Lucio de las Nuevas within easy ball-shot. He was splashing through water about two feet deep overgrown with samphire bushes, and “roared” at intervals—a curious sort of ventriloquial “gurgle,” followed by a bellow which I could still distinguish when he had passed quite two miles away. With the binoculars I distinguished at vast distance five other camels in the direction the single bull was taking.
Here we insert a note received from the co-author’s brother, J. Crawhall Chapman:—