Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Contributed by Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.
| www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Transcription
California Condor
Eben McMillan
3 February 1964
under its wings. Its head was thin, small, and black except
for a short ring of about two inches at the base of its
neck where the bare head emerges from the neck feathers. When this
immature condor left our camp area it returned and landed on ground by
other condors, and Ravens, that were feeding on the lower sheep carcass.
The lower sheep carcass on which the condors had fed had been
dragged downhill about 100 feet. The less remained of this sheep
carcass the farther it continued to be dragged, and the more the condors
fought over it.
A Golden Eagle came and dove at two condors that were hovering
in the air about twenty feet above the sheep carcass. Those dives were
rather slow and did not seem to concern the condor much.
At 11:00 A.M. we left our camp in the pickup and drove to the
top of the ridge above where the lower sheep carcass had been left.
We had observed condor leaving the area of the sheep carcass
as we were breaking camp and assumed all the birds had
flown above Hopper mountain, or gone out of sight northward.
Stopping the pickup on the brow of the ridge we walked down
to look over the brow of the hill to where the sheep carcass
had been dragged in order that we might inspect what was
left of the sheep carcass. Looking over the brow of this ridge
we saw three adult and the imm. Bingham-headed condor standing
around the remains of this carcass which was now about sixty
feet below where we stood. The condors saw us as we looked
over the brow of the ridge but remained about the carcass
for about two minutes before they leisurely flew up into the
air and circled above us for two or three minutes before going -