154 VULTUKID.E. 



great quantities crossed at the same time as flights of Booted 

 Eagles, Snake-Eagles, Common Buzzards, Ked and Black Kites ; 

 Verner noticed numbers passing at Gibraltar on the 25th of 

 March 1877, 31st of March 1878, and 28th March 1879. 



The Neophron usually begins to lay about the 1st of April. 



Verner found eggs on the 6th of April, slightly incubated, and 

 on the 13th of April two quite fresh ; he says " the second egg 

 is always laid some days later than the first one ; often the eggs 

 in same nest vary in depth of colouring, but there is no rule as 

 to whether the first or second egg has most colouring." 



Two eggs seem to be the usual number ; the pair are usually 

 alike, but those from different nests vary very much some are 

 almost round, others much elongated ; some blackish brown, and 

 others almost white. 



I have known a third egg laid in a nest from which one had 

 been abstracted, one having been left ; but whether the third 

 egg was laid by the same bird is of course " not proven." 



Verner, on the 18th of April, 1879, found Neophrons laying in 

 an old nest of the Snake-Eagle (Circaetus gallicus), from which I 

 had, in May 1877, shot an old bird ; this nest was on a bough of 

 a cork-tree, about twenty feet from the ground. He took an egg 

 on the 18th, and on the 25th a second egg, snaring one of the 

 old birds, ultimately to liberate it. The Snake-Eagles constructed 

 a fresh nest close by. This is the only instance which I know 

 of the Neophron nesting in a tree in Andalucia, but the Indian 

 Neophrons usually do so. 



The nest is often easily accessible from below, and, placed on 

 a ledge of some overhung rock, generally at the top of a sierra, 

 is composed of a few dead sticks, always lined with wool, rags, 

 and rubbish such as a dog's head, boars' tusks, dead kittens, 

 foxes' skulls and fur, rotten hedgehogs, dead toads, dead snakes, 

 skeletons of snakes, lizards, mummified lizards, lizards' heads, 

 carapaces of the water-tortoise, rotten fish, excrement both of 

 man and beast, bones, bits of rope and paper. In one nest Verner 



