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.