BEARDED VULTURE. 15 
Lieutenant-Colonel Delme Radcliffe writes to mc from Fort Attock, 
India, March 25th., 1869:— 
"We frequently see the Lammergeyer sailing about within gunshot 
of the fort — one or two at a time generally after a storm; but any day 
when I go up to the higher ground after oorial I see several sailing 
about the peaks, though the highest points are only two thousand one 
hundred feet high (in the Attock range). I fancy the Lammergeyer 
must go a long time without food. On one occasion ten years ago, 
when in the Himalaya in the snows, I saw two or three feeding on a 
deer I had shot the previous day, and which had fallen over a preci- 
pice. Since then I have never seen this bird in the act of feeding, nor 
have I ever found food or remains of food in the crop or stomach of 
those I have killed, except on one occasion in 1867, when I found the 
hoof of a markhoor goat in the stomach of one I killed at Kalabagh. 
I think Dr. Adams mentions once finding the hoof of an ibex in one. 
When they visit the fort and its environs here they sail round as if 
intently searching the ground for something, and on certain spots they 
suddenly stop and alight; and I have watched them with my glass 
swallowing one or two large stones, and then away they sail again. 
Upon the higher ground I rarely see them alight, except towards night- 
fall. Goatherds take their flocks all over the hills, and I cannot hear 
from them that any injury is done to them by the Lammergeyer. 
The oorial are not numerous enough to afford them subsistence for 
any time, and I cannot hear that anyone ever found them, young or 
old, that the Lammergeyer could be supposed to have destroyed. 
Of other food there is none. Wolves, of which there are a few, are 
out of the question, and there are some foxes; but I should doubt 
(though it may be true that they may knock a chamois or an oorial 
over a precipice and eat it after), his vulturine foot, supposing him to 
be quick enough to seize, having the power to hold and kill a fox. 
Carrion there is none ever lying about the hills, and, though it is true 
I have seen them alight on the parade ground at Peshawur and pick 
up a stone or two, I have never, nor can I hear that anyone has seen 
them feeding at a carcase like other Vultures. 
The Raven is very abundant here, as it is at Peshawur down to 
Umballa. I think it is identical with the European species; but how 
it would surprise the English ornithologist to see, as one does every 
evening in Peshawur, some two or three hundred ravens congregated! 
One of the new barrack buildings at the station is a favourite resort 
for them as a roosting place. A ledge, extending along the whole front 
facing the plain, may be seen every evening at sundown in the cold 
weather perfectly black with Ravens, sometimes without a foot length 
