272 NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. 



about over the field until it espied a small snake, not thicker than a man's finger, 

 upon which it at once pounced. Moreover, a large and putrid carcass of a hog care- 

 fully covered by canes and brush so as to. be invisible, remained undiscovered by 

 the vultures in spite of the intolerable stench it sent out, though they frequently 

 passed by accident quite near it, and the dogs at once discovered it. Yet a small, 

 freshly-killed pig hidden near the same place was at once traced out by the vultures, 

 by the blood which was allowed to run from it as it Avas carried to its hiding- 

 place. 



Bachman subsequently repeated some of these tests at Charleston, S. C., and 

 added some new and perfectly convincing ones. The rough painting of a sheep, 

 skinned and cut open, soon brought vultures to examine and tug at it, and though the 

 experiment was repeated scores of times it never failed, on each fresh exposure, to 

 attract the hungry birds. A wheelbarrow-load of tempting carrion was next covered 

 by a single sheet of thin canvas, above which bits of fresh meat was strewn. The 

 fresh meat was soon eaten, but although the vultures must frequently have had their 

 bills within an eighth of an inch of the carrion beneath, they did not discover it. 



While at Valparaiso in 1834, Darwin experimented on twenty or thirty condors 

 which were kept in a garden at that place. They were tied in a long row at the foot 

 of a wall, each bird by a single rope, and Darwin walked backward and forward before 

 them, at a distance of about ten feet, with a piece of fresh meat in his hand, wrapped 

 securely in a piece of white paper. No notice whatever was taken of it by the birds. 

 He then threw it on the ground within a yard of an old male condor, who looked at 

 it carefully for a moment and paid no further attention. With a stick it was pushed 

 closer and closer, until he touched it at last with his beak, when instantly the paper 

 was torn off, while every bird in the long row began struggling and flapping its wings. 



The evidence on the other side of the question is very meagre. Darwin tells us 

 that a "gentleman mentioned at a meeting of the London Zoological Society that he 

 had twice seen the carrion-hawks in the West Indies collect on the roof of a house 

 when a corpse had become offensive from not having been buried ; " and a case is cited 

 by Mr. Gosse in his " Birds of Jamaica," where the stench from the putrid contents 

 of a soup-pot in a house caused one vulture after another, as he passed over, to 

 descend toward the house and sometimes take several turns about it before reluctantly 

 resuming his course. There is nothing however, in either of these cases that would 

 justify us in ascribing any unusual power of smell to the vultures even if we admit 

 that their actions were consequent on the odors they perceived, for the same odors 

 were perfectly perceptible to men in the neighborhood at fully as great a distance as 

 that at which the vultures are supposed to have discovered them. 



On the whole, when we remember the disgusting character of much of the vulture's 

 food, as well as the similar odor which of necessity the bird usually bears about with 

 it, we can hardly see how it would be possible for it to detect at a distance the 

 odor even of carrion, much less that of perfectly fresh meat or of living animals. 

 The obvious and simple explanation of ninety-nine one-hundredths of these remarkable 

 discoveries was first pointed out by Audubon and has been almost universally 

 accepted since. 



Probably in most regions where vultures of any species are fairly abundant, every 

 nook and corner of the surface is carefully scrutinized many times a dny, and by many 

 paii's of hungry eyes. Wheeling in graceful curves at varying heights, some scarcely 

 higher than the house-tops, others only visible to the human eye as mere moving 



