TURKEY VULTURE 19 



Wlien death comes to any animal, its body becomes food for the 

 vultures. As soon as the animal can no longer move, the meal is 

 ready, and if a vulture finds a dead body, although it be warm from 

 the life just flown, the bird begins at once to feed. But a large 

 animal — a horse or a cow — cannot be finished, even by a company of 

 voracious vultures, while the body is fresh. Putrefaction works fast 

 and overtakes the birds, and the end of the meal becomes far ad- 

 vanced in decomposition. Also it often happens, owing to the posi- 

 tion of the body, or because it is submerged, or because the hide is 

 too tough for the vulture's beak to tear, that little or none of it is 

 accessible to the birds. Then the vultures gather about the carcass, 

 in large numbers if it be a big one, and wait patiently near at hand 

 until time and decay, making it soft and ripe, shall fit it to their 

 needs. Then they descend and strip it to the bone. 



Thus evolution has led the vulture in its search for food away 

 from the other Kaptores and has compelled it to develop feeding 

 habits that it shares with few companions among birds and mammals. 

 The vulture shows apparently little preference in its choice of 

 food. It is a useful bird in the Southern States, where it disposes 

 of the dead animals about the farms, and, as Dr. Pearson (1919) says, 

 "in many a southern city the Vultures constitute a most effective 

 street-cleaning department, and the garbage piles on the city's dump- 

 heaps are swept and purified by them. When the rancher of the 

 West dresses cattle for home consumption or the market, his dusky 

 friends in feathers gladly save him the trouble of burying the offal." 

 Wright and Harper (1913), writing of the Okefinokee Sw^amp, re- 

 mark that "it is astonishing how soon the buzzards appear over a 

 spot where an alligator has been shot, and how quickly they trans- 

 form its carcass into a bare skeleton." 



Florence A. Merriam (1896) reports from California that "Mr. 

 W. W. Merriam watched two of the buzzards eating skunks. They 

 began by pulling the skin from the head and ate till they came to 

 the scent gland, which they left on the ground." 



Snakes appear to be a favorite food. Ivan R. Tomkins, in a letter 

 to Mr. Bent, says : "I flushed two turkey buzzards from a clump of 

 willows. On looking into the bushes to see what they were discuss- 

 ing, I found the partly eaten remains of a cottonmouth moccasin that 

 had been dead some time. The head had dried instead of decom- 

 posing, and I picked it up with a forceps, and was able positively 

 to identify it. The buzzards had eaten the meat off the back bone 

 rather than swallowing the snake whole, as I would have expected." 

 E. M. Kempton (1927) says "a reptile was evidently a choice 

 relish, because one dead snake will call fifty vultures, more or less, 

 to the vicinity of its demise." 



