year; oologists (eight eggs taken in one year, 1900, ac- 
cording to W. L. Chambers) ; museum collectors. (Frank 
Stephens, in San Diego county paid ten dollars for each 
condor and sold a broken condor's egg for ninety.) 
  Second. The condor was the finest mark a fool ever 
shot at. Here was a bird who deserved to meet man at 
his best. He possessed the majesty 
 
 
of the eagle combined with the 
gentleness of the swan. There was 
nothing about him to tempt the 
avarice of a decent man. He was 
made for eyes that worship gran- 
deur. The photographs of Finley 
and   Bohlman    are  testimonial 
enough. But he met the race on a 
fool's holiday. His very greatness 
was his undoing. His size and dig- 
nity made a way of distinction for 
the meanest. Men who dared not 
meet a grizzly could kill a condor 
and boast of it the rest of their 
lives. Conspicuous, trustful, curi- 
ous, home-loving, the condor's 
 
 
home was easily rifled and left a    MADE OF CONDOR 
shambles.                                  A feather dar 
                                                 Indian 
    Last summer in Sespe Gorge I                  San D 
 must have been near a condor's 
 summer home for the birds flew back and forth about me 
 for a long time. Finally two of them sailed over me within 
 a stone's throw. In January of the same year I stood on a 
 ridge in Santa Barbara National Forest, last stronghold of 
 the condor, when an assemblage of fifteen condors (pos- 
 sibly one third of all in existence) passed over me twice. 
 I was in plain sight of them. At least a dozen, both adults 
 and immatures, sailed within a hundred feet of me at 
 different times. You could ride a horse around a fir tree 
 where condors were perched without making them fly. 
 I shuddered to think how easily they could be killed. 
   Third. The treatment of the condor in Lower California 
is a counterpart, in miniature, of that accorded him in 
southern California. Only, below the border, his home 
was less accessible, there were fewer birds and a mere 
handful of people. Condors once ranged for two hundred 
miles south of the International Boundary, down the 
backbone of the Peninsula. In 1906 they were plentiful 
in the San Pedro Martir, highest section of the sierra. 
E. W. Nelson and party saw twelve at the carcass of a 
donkey and shot two. A. W. Anthony found them nu- 
merous in 1895 but reported that no opportunity to shoot 
a condor for its quills (in which placer miners carried 
gold dust) was allowed to pass. Forty years later that 
practice was stopped. There are no more condors. 
 
 
  My son, Robert, and I explored the San Pedro Martir 
in August, 1935, in a vain search for condors. Only one 
was seen by resident cattlemen the whole year, that one 
early in November. The same men told us you could see 
twenty-five per day in 1915. We talked with two vaqueros 
who had shot three condors during the last three years. 
 
 
     -~  ~    ~   I    V       0,.' .. f UW3 
 ravens and buzzards, shot for fun, 
 near the ranch-house. No game 
 laws were enforced in this country. 
 How could condors escape? 
   Thus they vanished from the 
wild, cloud-piercing pinnacles of 
the San Pedro Martir, stricken 
down in tragic helplessness by un- 
couth vaqueros! 
   After all, is not man running 
true to form in shifting the blame 
for the destruction of the condor? 
Didn't he do the same thing in 
regard to the passenger pigeon? 
He loves to find a scapegoat for 
 
 
                       his misdeeds. And he halfwau be- 
SPLUMES                lieves his excuses. The pioneers 
icing skirt owned by an who slaughtered the pigeons were 
ear Palomar Mountain, 
iego County, California  too close to the tragedy to have per- 
                      spective. The persons who were 
  killing the condors didn't know what their contempora- 
  ries were doing. But now that a generation has passed 
  we can see that the detailed killings of a bird that in- 
  creases as slowly as a condor made an appalling ag- 
  gregate. 
    What of it, says the cynic-the condor couldn't sur- 
 vive anyway? The answer is outside this article. Suffice 
 to say that it has survived in the Santa Barbara Forest 
 region. Biologically it is just a glorified turkey vulture 
 and can subsist where several of them can live-wherever 
 there are deer, cattle or humbler provender-and safety. 
    And still the crowds are pouring into California. And, 
 alas, the protection afforded the pitiable remnant of the 
 grand and lonely birds in the Santa Barbara Forest is 
 not commensurate with the menace. The condor in the 
 San Diego Zoo was captured with a broken wing; within 
 the decade a dead one was left in a gunny sack at the door 
 of the Natural History Museum. I know what I would 
 do if I had the power-go far beyond what Hornaday 
 urged Californians to do twenty-three years ago, which 
 was, to "raise the fine for molesting a condor to $500 
 with a long prison-term as an alternative and appoint 
 an exclusive condor warden". Millions of people, mil- 
 lions of dollars to spend, millions of acres of wild land 
 but only a few dozen condors! 
 
 
t 
 
 
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