BIRDS AS SCAVENGERS 



stock animals may subsequently drink. It is a much 

 safer plan to bury the carcass of an animal which has 

 died of disease than to let vultures intern it, but the 

 former cannot always be done, for obvious reasons. 



In some parts of India the human dead are placed 

 on top of flat towers, and in a very short space of 

 time the vultures pick the bones clean. In Northern 

 Africa and Arabia the people of the villages are 

 exceedingly insanitary in their habits, and if it were 

 not for the sanitary services rendered by the vultures 

 and the hyaenas, pestilence would decimate the people. 



The gull is one of Nature's finest feathered 

 scavengers. The vulture and the raven are the 

 sanitarians of the hills and veld, and the gull does a 

 like service along the sea coasts. 



The gull is a surface feeder, and its mission in life 

 is to eat up dead animal life floating on the sea or cast 

 up by the tide. It occasionally destroys fish, but the 

 harm it does the fishing industry amounts to nothing 

 in proportion to the colossal services it renders as a 

 scavenger. Now and then when a shoal of small 

 fishes are being hunted by carnivorous fish and in 

 their terror come to the surface or into the shallows, 

 the gulls will snap up a few. At other times the 

 cormorants assemble in large numbers, and, forming 

 themselves in crescent formation, deliberately drive a 

 shoal of small fishes into the shallows. Gulls on these 

 occasions hover overhead and snatch up some of the 

 fish, but the number they secure in this way is trifling. 

 Fishermen's stories about the gull being a great 

 devourer of live fish are not true. They have a strong 



