A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
condor
The condor is a very large New World vulture with a wingspan around nine and a half feet, built to travel enormous distances without flapping. It rides thermals and ridge lift and can cover a hundred miles in a day on almost no muscular effort, holding its wings out on locked joints. There are two species: the Andean condor along the length of South America, and the California condor in the mountains and canyons of the American West.
Etymology
The name comes from kuntur in Quechua, the language of the Andes and of the Inca state, and Spanish carried it into English in the seventeenth century. The California condor’s scientific name is a separate story: Gymnogyps californianus means bare vulture, from Greek, describing the featherless head that lets a bird feed inside a carcass and then clean itself in the sun.
Notes
Condors have no voice box and can only hiss and grunt. The bare skin of the head flushes color when the bird is excited, so it signals with its face. In Andean tradition, the condor stands for the upper world in a three-part scheme with the puma for the middle and the snake for the lower, and it appears in that role on textiles and stonework for thousands of years.