174 Mr Audubon 07i> the Habits of the Turkey Buzzard, 



was dead and putrid. I then retired about a few hundred 

 yards, and, in the lapse of some minutes, a vulture, coursing 

 round the field, tolerably high, espied the skin, sailed directly 

 towards it, and alighted within a few yards of it. I ran imme- 

 diately, covered by a large tree, until within about forty yards, 

 and from that place could spy the bird with ease. He ap- 

 proached the skin, — looked at it without apparent suspicion, — 

 jumped on it, — ^raised his tail, and voided itself freely (as, you 

 well know, all birds of prey in a wild state generally do before 

 feeding), — then approaching the eyes, that were here solid 

 globes of hard dried and painted clay, attacked first one and 

 then the other, with, however, no further advantage than that of 

 disarranging them. This part was abandoned ; the bird walked 

 to the other extremity of the pretended animal, and there, with 

 much exertion, tore the stitches apart, until much fodder and 

 hay was pulled out, but no flesh could the bird find, or smell ; 

 he was intent on discovering some where none existed, and, after 

 reiterated efforts, all useless, he took flight, coursed about the 

 field, when, suddenly rounding and falling, I saw him kill a 

 small garter snake, and swallow it in an instant. The vulture 

 rose again, sailed about, and passed several times quite low over 

 my stuffed deer skin, as if loath to abandon so good-looking a 

 prey. 



Judge of my feelings when I plainly saw that the vulture which 

 could not discover, through its extraordinary sense of smell, 

 that no flesh, either fresh or putrid, existed about that skin, 

 could, at a glance, see a snake scarcely as large as a man's fin- 

 ger, ahve and destitute of odour, hundreds of yards distant. 

 I concluded that, at all events, his ocular powers were much bet- 

 ter than his sense of smell. 



Second Experiment. — I had a large dead hog hauled some 

 distance from the house, and put into a ravine, about^twenty feet 

 deeper than the surface of the earth around it, narrow and wind- 

 ing, much filled with briars and high cane. In this I made 

 the negroes conceal the hog, by binding cane over it, until I 

 thought it would puzzle either buzzards, carrion crows, or any 

 other birds, to see it, and left it for two days. This !was 

 early in the month of July, when in this latitude a dead body 



