Of the other birds that the traveller may see a brief space must suffice. Condors, with an eight-foot spread of wing, are common in the Andean region, and are rather numerous at Port Desire and among the rocks up the river there. The carancho is a great white-breasted bird, that is something like an eagle and something like a buzzard; it is everywhere abundant. Seated on the top of a bush on the gray-brown expanse of the desert, it is a most conspicuous object to the eye. Both condors and caranchos follow the panther, to feast on the game it slays for fun. The shepherds say they watch these birds when hunting panthers, and where a number of them gather somewhat excitedly, they invariably find a panther hiding near the dead carcass of some animal. Both kinds of birds, too, have the faculty of seeing when an animal of any kind is from any cause so near to death as to be unable to defend itself, and so gather to tear the unfortunate beast to pieces while yet alive. In the old days, when Punta Arenas was a convict station, the prisoners often escaped to the desert singly or in twos or threes. Hardy ones were known to work their way at times to the Argentine with the aid of Indians or even alone, but the majority fell by the way. Their fate was pitiful. With the lack of food and the gnawing of thirst, their strength gave way until they could but stagger on with faces to the north. And as they staggered came shadows circling over the sand about them. Then the shadows became substance in the form of black-winged condors and white-crested vultures of fierce aspects and an eager hunger for living human flesh. The unfortunate would rouse himself to shout and hurl stones at this devilish host—for a time with success, but sooner or later he would stumble and fall, and then they came and tore him to pieces.
Remarkable as it must seem to the reader, parrots are found in the forests of the Andes as far south as the heads of the Gallegos River. They can be taught to talk, too, and are, in fact, very much like tropical parrots in all respects. They exist in the Rio Negro region in great flocks.
There is but one species of bird there, they say, that does not fear the feathered cats of the air, and that is a species which one naturally would not expect to find in Patagonia at all—the humming bird. It does not seem to be a region of flowers and honey, as we commonly expect a humming bird's resort to be, though it abounds in insects such as humming birds like, but both flowers and honey are there, and so, too, are several kinds of humming birds in the summer season.
As has been said, let the Yankee tourist who is a lover of nature visit Patagonia, if only to see and study the birds. We Americans generally ask when something is proposed for us to do whether it will pay. I am not sure that even a Yankee could make money out of a tour through this desert, but if any one has made his pile high enough so that he can afford to go away and see some other part of the world, let him travel out of the way—go to Patagonia and Punta Arenas instead of Paris.
