NIGHT AND DAY HUNTERS 199 



latitudes, never nesting farther north than New Jersey on 

 the Atlantic Coast, though, strangely enough, the black 

 vulture, with a more southerly range, has also penetrated 

 into the interior as far as British Columbia. Lewis and 

 Clarke met the buzzard about the falls of the Oregon, and 

 it is still not uncommon on the Pacific Slope. Neverthe- 

 less, it is about the shambles of towns in the West Indies 

 and other hot countries that the black buzzard or carrion 

 crow finds life the pleasantest. It has the tropical vice of 

 laziness, so closely allied to cowardliness, and Hves where 

 there is the least possible necessity for exercising the stronger 

 virtues. Our soldiers in the war with Spain tell of the final 

 touch of horror given to the Cuban battlefields where their 

 wounded and dead comrades fell, by the gruesome black 

 vultures that often were the first to detect a corpse lying 

 unseen among the tall grass. 



As night approaches, one buzzard after another flies to- 

 ward favorite perches in the trees, preferably dead ones, 

 and settles, with much flapping of wings, on the middle 

 branches; then stretching its body and walking along the 

 roost like a turkey, until it arrives at the chosen spot, it 

 hisses or grunts through its nostrils at the next arrival, 

 whose additional weight frequently snaps the dead branch 

 and compels a number of the great birds to repeat the pro- 

 longed process of settling to sleep. But, very frequently, 

 buzzards perch like dark spectres on the chimneys of 

 houses, at night, especially in winter, in order to warm their 

 sensitive bodies by the rising smoke, and, after a rain, they 

 often spread their wings over the flues to dry their water- 

 soaked feathers. This spread-eagle attitude is also taken, 

 anywhere the bird happens to be, when the sim comes out 

 after a drenching shower. 



