170 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I50 



The first report of the yellow-headed vulture as a bird of Panama 

 came in the dry season of 1948 when Watson M. Perrygo and I were 

 in the field on the eastern side of the Azuero Peninsula. On March 

 17, during routine collecting, we shot 3 turkey vultures at the Cienaga 

 Macana, near the small settlement of El Rincon, not far from the 

 lower course of the Rio Santa Maria. In life they had seemed some- 

 what small, and in the hand the peculiar head markings brought to 

 mind at once the yellow-headed vultures that I had known in the 

 distant Chaco of northern Argentina and western Paraguay. The 

 head colors were recorded on Kodachrome film within an hour 

 through the assistance of Richard Stewart of the National Geographic 

 Society. Subsequent studies of vultures in museum collections led 

 to their identification in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Phila- 

 delphia with Cassin's ancient type specimen of Cathartes burrovianus. 

 Since this recognition of its presence the bird has been found regu- 

 larly on the Pacific slope of Panama. Thus far it has been seen in 

 the savannas and the sections adjacent to them, east to the region near 

 the Rio La Jagua. It is possible that it may occur also in Darien in 

 the extensive swamps adjacent to the lower Rio Sabana and the Rio 

 Tuira. 



In the open marshes toward the Rio Chico, below the La Jagua 

 Hunting Club in dry season I have recorded them constantly, some- 

 times to the number of 20 to 30 in a day. As they are never disturbed 

 here they are not wild. Often I have walked very near them as they 

 rested quietly in low, leafless trees. These lower areas around lagoons 

 containing water are their regular haunt, and their occurrence on 

 the higher savannas comes mainly during the period of rains. 



They have the same graceful flight as the red-headed species, but on 

 the whole seem more sedentary and less given to soaring at great 

 altitudes. Fish seem to be a regular food, sought in drying pools, 

 and they seem to come to mammal carcasses infrequently. One that I 

 shot at La Jagua had fragments of fish in the crop, so fresh that they 

 had evidently been taken alive. Once, near David, I saw one flying 

 with a large dead lizard in its bill to prevent being robbed of its meal 

 by black vultures, one of the few occasions on which I have seen a 

 vulture of this genus carrying anything. 



Little is known of their nesting in the Republic. Near the Rio San 

 Pablo a short distance below Sona on May 14, 1953, I found a pair 

 with two young, only recently able to fly, that rested in an open- 

 branched tree. Early the following morning the young were not seen 

 on my arrival, but at my first shot at another bird both came flying to 



