“Round the lower part of the neck both sexes, the female as well as the male, are furnished with a broad white ruff of downy feathers, which forms the line of separation between the naked skin above and the true feathers covering the body below it. All the other feathers, with the exception of the wing coverts, and the secondary quill feathers, are of a bright black, generally mingled with a grayish tinge of greater or less intensity. In the female the wing coverts are blackish gray; but the males have their points, and frequently as much as half their length, white. The wings of the latter are consequently distinguished from those of the female by their large white patches. The secondary quill feathers of both sexes are white on the outer side. The tail is short and wedge shaped. The legs are excessively thick and powerful, and are colored of a blueish gray, intermingled with whitish streaks. Their elongated toes are united at the base by a loose but very apparent membrane, and are terminated by long black talons of considerable thickness, but very little curved. The hinder toe is shorter than the rest, and its talon, although more distinctly curved, is equally wanting in strength, a deficiency which renders the foot much less powerful as an organ of prehension than that of any other of the large birds of the raptorial order.”
The Condor is found in various parts of the vast mountain chain on the western border of the American continent, but it is most common in Peru and Chile. Its habitation is most frequently at an elevation of 10,000 or 15,000 feet above the level of the sea, and there these birds are seen in groups of three or four, but never in large companies like the true vultures. Some of the mountain peaks bear names which in the Indian tongue mean Condor’s Look-out, Condor’s Roost and Condor’s Nest. Two of them will attack a vicuna, a heifer or even a puma, and overcome it by repeated strokes of their beaks and talons. When gorged, says Humboldt, they sit sullen and sombre on the rocks; and when thus overloaded with food they will suffer themselves to be driven before the hunter rather than take wing. They do not attack men or even children, although it is admitted that two of them would be a match for a powerful man without weapons. Sir Francis Head gives an amusing account of a contest between one of his Cornish miners and a gorged Condor, which lasted an hour, and terminated in the escape of the bird.