The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and PatagoniaSpears, John Randolph
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The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
Spears, John Randolph
Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) -- Description and travel
As trophies the geese found in Patagonia are remarkably beautiful. The
Antarctic gander is snow white, with a bluish bill, while the female is
colored and mottled in a way that makes her little, if any, less
attractive to the eye than a North American wood duck. The ducks, on the
other hand, are not especially beautiful. The teal is about the
handsomest of the lot.
Black-necked swans are common enough, the bodies, save for the head and
neck, being entirely white. So, too, are swans that have black heads,
necks, backs and wings, with snow-white breasts. This is a most
beautiful bird, and when roasted gaucho fashion over an open fire is
said to be the best eating of any bird of the south end of the
continent.
The swans, geese, and ducks are all found on the lakes 7000 feet or more
above the sea, as well as on the seashore. The lakes form their favorite
breeding-places.
Another bird sure to interest the sportsman is the Patagonian prairie
chicken known as the tinamou. It lives on the most arid desert as well
as near the streams. There are two varieties. The larger one is known as
the rufous and the smaller one as the spotted tinamou. Both give as good
shooting, and are as good to eat as prairie chickens or quails, and as
game they are not materially different from their North American
cousins. But the spotted fellow has peculiarities. The cowboys, when a
flock is started, make a dash at the birds with yells and howls that
simply unnerve the game. The birds squat down and permit themselves to
be lifted up in the hands, and then, after a gasp or two, stretch out as
if dead. If in this case, however, the bird be released from the hand,
it springs away with a partridge-like whirr that is startling even to
the experienced. More curious still, when the number of charging gauchos
is enough to surround the flock, and the noise and excitement is in
consequence great, the birds are actually frightened to death. The
gauchos are a heartless lot as a class, and many birds that are only
simulating death are mutilated in the most cruel fashion.
We now come to the birds that are interesting to the naturalist as
distinguished from the sportsman, although the list of edible birds has
been by no means exhausted. Of these the gulls, cormorants, and penguins
will first attract the attention of the traveller. The Cape Horn pigeon,
a gull the size of a pigeon, is the most beautiful picture in black and
white I ever saw. It hovers about the ship in the most friendly fashion
and with never a quiver or flop of the wings sails right into the teeth
of the hardest gale--rising or sinking at will. But when caught in a
flaw of wind near a wave-crest it gives a few energetic wing beats, and
then is away again as easily as before.
The ability to sail directly into the wind with wings held extended and
without flopping, which all seagulls possess, can nowhere be more
readily studied than on the Patagonia coast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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