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July, 1914 COMMUNICATIONS 187 'FIELD EXPERIENCES ON THE COAST OF CHILE Editor THE CON?OR: On my return from Juan Fernandez Island I received your letter, but regret to say that the package of Condors which you so kindly forwarded could not be located at the Valparaiso postoffice. They would cer- tainly have been appreciated, as United States publications come high down here. Mrs. Beck was nearly speechless when charged fifty cents for a fifteen cent Amer- ican magazine in Lima, Peru. Retrieving hummingbirds on Juan Fer- nandez was like retrieving mountain goats in cliffy canyons of the Rocky Mountains, if the published yarns of such feats be true. One had to lay down his gun and climb down by tree roots, at times hol'ding by one hand so as to secure a hold with the other on the rocky ledge below and search amid ferns and grass for his bird. One beauty, I remember in particular, was shot in the edge of the trail at the top of the mountain where some sixty years ago an English man- of-war's crew erected a tablet in memory of Alexander Selkirk, the well known Robinson Crusoe who spent four years and four months in complete solitude on the island, if the tablet be believed. The bird dropped only thirty feet, but it was necessary to go below and climb up over roots on the face of the cliff, holding on to grass stems or loose rocks that in some places gave way at a touch. Pigeon collecting there also was different from California styles. One would take a boat and row along the shore, and the pig- eons flew 'by from rocky perches as Baird Cormorants might do in home waters. The Sparrow Hawks, though, acted the same as our home birds; and I even flashed a pair of California Quail one day to my great sur- -prise. The quail had been introduced a few years before and were increasing, so the natives said. The first day on the island, when at the edge of the forest I dropped my hand into the pocket of the sleeveless shoot- ing coat for shells, the odor in the air took me back to the hills of Monterey. How like the sage-brush smell it was; and it was the sage-brush smell, carried all the way from Toro Canyon, Monterey County! The coat had not been used since the first day of the quail' season the year before, and it had never been emptied ot? the debris accumu- lated when followrig the elusive birds on brush-covered hillsides. And speaking fur- ther of California quail, they were common in the Valparaiso markets both dead and alive, costing about ten cents apiece. I took a snap at a cagefull on the street and heard several calling just back of the town in the canyons. Changing the subject, you know that skeleton of the giant cuttle-fish (is it?) in the Golden Gate Park Museum? Do not some members of the squid fami13r get about as large? I still remember (can it be thirty years back?) that old geography picture: the two sailors working with all their might chopping at the huge tentacles of a giant cuttle-fish that had grasped their boat while their sailing ship was beating up a mile or more away. Will you please tell me what part of the waters of the gl'obe those monsters inhabit? If I can find out, I intend to give that locality a wide berth in this collecting business. I had thought the squids were night feeders, from the statements of my Monterey Bay fishermen friends; but collecting one day about six miles off Val- paraiso, alone as usual, I notlied a bunch of kelp a short distance from me being agi- tated more than seemed natural by the light wind and sea, so rowed up and it was not kelp, but a school of squid feeding. They were only about four or five feet long; but to see those five or six l'ong feelers rise out a foot or two above the water, reach for- ward and back toward the mouth about four times a minute--ugh! They were but fif- teen or twenty feet away at times and could be seen perfectly; and then looking off, why there were acres of them! Schools of four or five and schools of hundreds. Birds were feeding among them, terns, shearwaters and gulls, on small shrimps, I found on dissec- tion. But suppose they had' been those giant relatives figured so graphically in the geography of my youth. Only a shrimp would I have been to one of those big fel- lows.' I saw dozens of the bodies of these five-footers on the beach at Corral when coming south, and del'iver me from any close acquaintance with relatives as large sized as that skeleton in the museum, please ! I made my first acquaintance with the Steamer Ducks here. With most of them it was a distant acquaintance. There are two or three particular birds near town here that if ever I get rich will see me again. In that case, I'm coming down here with a motor boat capable of twenty miles an hour, and a bag of salt, and if I don't sprinkle their tails it will be because they make for the kelp instead of the open water. Though they cannot fly, my best efforts with the oars take me about two feet to their three.