54 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



had, and he answered that save the hissing of the young, the 

 only noise that he had ever heard was a kind of grunt made by 

 the adult birds when they alight. Professor John Collett, in 

 his Geological Survey of Indiana for 1875, writes interestingly 

 about the weird beauty of the Shades of Death and its buz- 

 zard rookery. In closing his sketch he says : "At the 'rookery' 

 all the buzzards living within ten or fifteen miles meet each 

 summer evening for information, converse and mutual assist- 

 ance. The fact is mentioned as an instance of the social in- 

 stinct of the bird." 



The food of the turkey vulture consists of carrion and 

 this makes of it a filthy bird and accounts for its bare head 

 and neck. In the South they are very numerous and in sev- 

 eral of the States are protected because of the good they do 

 as scavengers, and they become quite tame. Whether they 

 discover their food by sight or by scent has been a theme for 

 much controversy. Audubon made experiments for the pur- 

 pose of answering the question. He says: "I procured a skin 

 of our common deer, entire to the hoofs and stuffed it care- 

 fully with dried grass until filled rather above the natural size 

 suffered the whole to become perfectly dry and as hard as 

 leather took it to the middle of a large open field, and laid it 

 down upon its back with the legs up and apart, as if the ani- 

 mal were dead and putrid. I then retired a few hundred yards 

 and in the lapse of some minutes a vulture coursing around 

 the field, tolerably high, espied the skin, sailed directly toward 

 it, and alighted within a few yards of it. I ran immediately 

 covered by a large tree, until within about forty yards, and 

 from that place could spy the bird with ease. He approached 

 the skin, looked at it without apparent suspicion, raised his tail 

 and avoided itself freely (as you well know all birds of prey in 

 a wild state generally do before feeding), then approaching the 

 eyes, that were here solid globes of Hard, dried and painted 

 clay, attacked first one and then the other, with, however, no 

 further advantage than that of disarranging them. This part 

 was abandoned ; the bird walked to the other extremity of the 

 pretended animal, and there, with much exertion, tore the 

 stitches apart, until much fodder and hay were pulled out; 

 but no flesh could the bird find or smell ; he was intent on 



