On the second day, after preserving the skins, I went up on the pampa to the edge of the cliff where the landslide had occurred and with glasses discovered a young condor on a ledge in the perpendicular wall twenty feet below the edge of the cliff. By means of ropes held at the surface by stakes, with Martin's help, I climbed down to the ledge where the orphaned fledgling as large as a turkey crouched in the most abject loneliness. She showed some fight as I worked my way toward her, but slipping a noose over a foot outstretched threateningly toward me she was easily captured and drawn to the pampa above.
The shelf where the young bird was found was a narrow ledge some fifteen feet in length by three feet in greatest height and width. The nest, if it may be called such, was nothing more than a slight depression of the shelf at its widest and
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young south american condor in characteristic
attitude on nest-ledge
highest part. There was nothing in it but the fine gravel and small fragments of broken fossil shells from the strata out of which the shelf was hollowed. The edge was white with excrement, and the epiphysis of a sheep's limb-bone was the only sign of food. A small shelf just above the nest, in the wall of the cliff, served as a roosting place, and its edge, too, was white-washed.
The heights of the Andes are generally regarded as the home of the condor tho it is frequently seen soaring over the pampa far from the foothills. Within the past twenty years the grassy slopes and valleys along the coast arid rivers of Patagonia have been dotted with extensive sheep farms, where sheep are raised for wool alone. Most of these animals die on the pampa of age or exposure and the abundance of food has probably induced the condor to extend its breeding
