284 
NESTS AND EGGS OF 
slightly raised, with steady, uniform motion. These aerial diversions are 
never performed singly, but in small parties of a dozen or more, and are 
more common in early spring, and at the close of the breeding-period, 
than during the intervening time. It is also to be remarked that they 
are executed in silence, for the Turkey Buzzards, like their indigenous 
American relatives, are a mute species, the only sound of which they are 
capable, being a kind of hiss, which has not been inaptly compared to the 
seething noise emitted by plunging a hot iron in a vessel of water. 
When ready to breed they look around for a hollow tree, or some 
stump or log in a state of decay, either upon the ground, or but slightly 
elevated above it. Generally, there are no indications of a nest. In occa- 
sional cases a few rotten leaves are scratched into the hollow selected for 
the deposition of the eggs, the latter being laid without any previous care 
having been taken for their preservation and shelter. In Southern New 
Jersey, we have sometimes strayed upon the nest in the midst of a deep 
and almost impenetrable morass, placed within an excavated stump. 
Within the rock-caverns along the wide, shallow Susquehanna, as many 
as a dozen nests have been observed in a few hundred yards of space, 
often as early as the last week of March, when the weather was favorable, 
but generally not till the middle of April. A few individuals have been 
known to remain in the vicinity of their breeding-quarters through the 
entire year, when the winters are not extremely rigorous. At Parkers- 
burg, near the western boundary of Chester County, T. H. Jackson, of 
West Chester, Pa., has found it breeding; but within Philadelphia it rarely 
does, if at all. In Delaware County, paired individuals have been observed 
early in April under rather suspicious circumstances. In Southern Ohio 
it is a common summer sojourner. Mr. Gosse, in speaking of the birds 
in Jamaica, says that they nest in depressions in the rock, and in the 
ledges thereof, in retired localities, and also upon inaccessible cliffs. On 
Galveston Island, Audubon found the birds nesting in great numbers 
either under widespread cactus branches, or underneath low bushes, in the 
midst of tall grasses in level saline marshes. 
