A NESTING PLACE OF VULTURES. 345 



We have for instance seen large companies of vultures 

 roosting in the trees of gardens, not many miles from 

 Calcutta, some of the trees within sight of the public 

 road being loaded with them. 



Then as regards their resting places: these we 

 believe to be generally located in some retired spot 

 in the wilderness, where enormous assemblages of these 

 useful but unclean birds collect from all quarters, and 

 associate like rooks during the breeding season. 



Captain Forsyth has left us a description of one of 

 these wild scenes, which he accidentally came upon 

 during his wanderings among the Hatti Hills, in Central 

 India, located among some magnificent basaltic cliffs, 

 embosomed in the forest: 



" The path (he says) wound along the top of a long spur 

 of naked basalt. At one point the rock formed a sheer cliff 

 many hundreds of feet in height, composed of a vast con- 

 glomeration of pentagonal pillars, broken off at different 

 lengths. This singularly favourable situation for nest building 

 had been occupied by an immense colony of vultures, the 

 whole face of the rock for miles being whitened by their 

 droppings, while numbers of these birds were perched on the 

 cliffs, or sailing over the ravines." * "I had often (he goes on 

 to say) wondered where these birds bred, for although there are 

 myriads in all inhabited tracts of Central India, only a few nests 

 are to be seen, here and there, in the tops of trees. Here 

 was the puzzle solved in the grim and retired solitude of the 

 ' Valley of Vultures. ' But a single hill a few minutes flight 

 separated them from the thickly populated plains, and yet that 

 ravine is probably as seldom looked upon by the eye of man 

 as if it were a guano island in the Pacific Ocean." t 



* Most of these were either the brown vulture (Gyps Bengalensis) 

 or the common white scavenger (Neophum Perenopterus). 



j The Highlands of Central India, by Captain James Forsyth, 

 Bengal Staff Corps, Edit. 1889, pp. 246 47 (originally published 1871). 



