In July 1896, the wealthy California collector A.W. Anthony and his party set out from San Diego for a tour of the west Mexican islands.
One of Anthony’s companions, Horace Amidon Gaylord, D.D.S., reported that their schooner “anchored at the Mecca of the expedition, Guadalupe Island,” on September 17. Anthony immediately proceeded to the very top of the island and set up camp, hoping to descry one of the three or four Guadalupe caracaras that the local goat hunters assured him still survived.
He had no luck. But on September 20, a group of hunters hailed Gaylord to tell him that a “Quelili,” apparently an echoic name for the bird, had landed in a cypress near their cabin.
A shot while the bird was still in the tree, and another, as, wounded, it circled within range, secured the only Guadalupe caracara of the expedition.
The Gaylord caracara, now in the Carnegie Museum, was not the last to be collected. The estimate of only three or four survivors in 1896 was, it turns out, low.
In 1898, a hunter by the name of Harry Drent returned from Guadalupe Island with a load of goat meat — and four living Guadalupe caracaras. Drent captured the birds by shooting and winging the first, then using it as a decoy to lure in three others, which he lassoed with a short rope. He later told a San Diego paper that
I have been offered $100 for the four, but I will not sell them. I have written the Smithsonian Institute, and am confident that I shall secure a high figure.
While awaiting his windfall from Washington, Drent exhibited the birds in the back room of “a saloon on Fifth Street near G” in San Diego, where they “attracted lots of attention” but were eventually evicted by the saloon owner “on account of their dirty habits.”
After taking his birds to California, Drent claimed that only three caracaras remained on Guadalupe. In fact, the species persisted, as the famed Rollo H. Beck discovered in 1900. Thirty years later, he wrote that
Although I had no idea of it at the time it seems probably to me that I secured the last of the Guadalupe caracaras on Guadalupe Island on the afternoon of December 1, 1900. Of 11 birds that flew toward me 9 were secured. The other two were shot at but got away. The 11 birds were all that were seen….
And all that would ever be seen again.
