AMERICAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



289 



covered with gray and white down, and marked with several narrow 

 black stripes, one being through the eye; they leave the nest within an 

 hour or two after coming from the egg, and follow their parents, pick- 

 ing up the food that they show them. 



When their flight feathers have fully grown, their upper parts are 

 clothed much the same as their parents, but without the black shaft 

 lines to the feathers, and they are entirely white below. When they 

 return the next spring they all, males and females, have spotted 

 breasts. 



C. A. Reed. 



■...•■■"^'\. 



THE 



CALIFORNIA 

 VULTURE 





Spreading a wing expanse of from nine to eleven feet, with a body 

 of the weight of a swan upborne between these Roc-like pinions, living 

 all its life in the most inaccessible portion of the westernmost ranges 

 of the New World, there is every reason that the eyes of ornithologists 

 the world over should turn with marked interest to the life and habits 

 of the California Condor. Fifty years and less ago these giant birds 

 were comparatively plentiful among the hills and vales of the lower 

 slopes of the Pacific coast where roamed countless heids of cattle, and 

 where the vaqueros realized the value of the vultures as scavengers 

 and so seldom molested then as they did the eagles and other pred- 

 atory birds, at that time even more plentiful than the condors. But 

 half a century agone is not today, and the most one can hope to have, 

 even after a long residence among the higher mountains of the west- 

 land is an occasional glimpse of one of these birds as he perches on 

 the stub of a dead pine back among the highest hills or a distant view 

 of one more bold than the re.'t as he feeds on some bit of carrion sur- 

 rounded by a band of turkey vultures that seem dwarfed beside this 

 monster of the upper air. 



