164 THE Birps Axsout Us. 
—about every other day—they would wander about 
the flat stones that formed there the bed of this 
apology for a creek and appeared to be hunting 
some kind of living food. They therefore appeared 
in a new vd/e, and I gave the matter considerable 
attention until I found that the lodged carcass of a 
drowned calf was the attraction, and only at certain 
stages of this creek, that rose and fell with every 
petty shower, could they get a chance to nibble at it. 
The incident showed, I thought, that food was very 
scarce, and they must indeed have very keen eye- 
sight to have found this tidbit, hidden as it was 
among rocks at the foot of a steep wooded cliff. 
The Black Vulture is the more Southern species, 
and is a common feature of many Southern cities as 
well as the country, and depended upon to some ex- 
tent as a scavenger. Nuttall’s account is as follows: 
‘«« Their flight is neither so easy nor so graceful as that of the Turkey- 
buzzard. They flap their wings and then soar horizontally, renewing 
the motion of their pinions at short intervals. . . . In the country, 
where I have surprised them feeding in the woods, they appeared 
rather shy and timorous, watching my movements alertly like hawks, 
and every now and then one or two of them, as they sat in the high 
boughs of a neighboring oak, communicated to the rest, as I slowly 
approached, a low bark of alarm or waugh, something like the sup- 
pressed growl of a puppy, at which the flock by degrees deserted the 
dead hog upon which they happened to be feeding. Sometimes they 
will collect together about one carcass to the number of two hundred 
and upward, and the object, whatever it may be, is soon robed in 
living mourning, scarcely anything being visible but a dense mass of 
these sable scavengers, who may often be seen jealously contending 
with each other, both in and out of the carcass, defiled with blood 
and filth, holding on with their feet, hissing and clawing each other, 
or tearing off morsels so as to fill their throats nearly to choking, and 
occasionally joined by growling dogs,—the whole presenting one of 
