Two Birds in Argentina

We spend three weeks in December in Argentina.  Week one, Buenos Aires, the city of Evita, tango, the Boca Juniors and Jorge Luis Borges.  Week two, the wind and spectacular peaks of Patagonia; week three, the desert canyons, salt flats, and Malbec grapes of Cayafata and Salta in the north. 

But the two images that will remain imprinted in my memory are images of birds.

The first we saw hiking a forested trail in Patagonia.  We heard a scruffing and clattering in the trees about seventy feet away.  At first I thought I was seeing a black mammal the size of a beaver or woodchuck bouncing around on a fallen log.  I looked closer and realized it was a woodpecker.  I thought, “My God, this is unreal, I’m seeing a cartoon come to life!”  Later I learned we had seen a Magellanic Woodpecker, and the forward-bending tuft of feathers on its head  made this chicken-sized bird the model for Woody Woodpecker.

The second image was created by an Andean condor.  We took a back road to the Perito Morino glacier and were driving through a hilly estancia where sheep were raised. Normally these huge black birds, wings spanning eight to ten feet, soar a thousand feet above the ground.  But here several condors were carving turns in the thermals only a hundred or so feet overhead.  I saw a sheep followed by its lamb moving along a trail a short distance from where we were watching.  Suddenly the two creatures were darkened in the shadow of a condor drifting above them.  The shadow didn’t just flit across their heads.  The condor is so huge they were in its shadow for what seemed like several seconds.

The condors are not raptors; they were no threat to the sheep.  But for anyone raised attending a Christian Sunday school it is a primal image: the lamb, and the Psalm: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death….