THE VULTURES 299 



number of Griffons in every part of Palestine is amazing, 

 and they are found at all seasons of the year. I do not 

 think I ever surveyed a landscape without its being 

 enlivened by the circling of a party of Griffons." He gives 

 a list of the places where he and his companions noticed 

 colonies of these great Vultures, and he describes one such 

 settlement : — 



" Wady Hamam is celebrated in Jewish history as the 

 stronghold of a powerful band of robbers and rebels, who 

 for years set at defiance all the power of Herod and the 

 Romans. On either side the cliffs rise to a height of more 

 than eight hundred feet, pierced and honeycombed by a 

 multitude of caverns and narrow passages. . . . From the 

 days of Titus to the present, these caverns have remained 

 the undisturbed home of the Griffons." Of this place and 

 another he says : " In either of these gorges the reverberat- 

 ing echoes of a single rifle-shot would bring forth Griffons 

 by the hundred from, their recesses. On one occasion I 

 counted one hundred and twenty thus roused, and then 

 gave up the reckoning in desj)air," there were so many 

 still to count. 



The Canon gives the bird quite a good character — for a 

 Vulture. He commends him as a bird of great intelligence, 

 and, apparently, not more unpleasant in his feeding than 

 the much-admired Eagle. He may drive away other birds 

 while he is feasting, but his fellow- Griffons are welcome to 

 share in his meal, to any number. He does not "snarl" 

 and quarrel over his find, as would a party of scavenger 

 dogs, or snatch a better mouthful from a weaker neighbour. 



His strength is in his wings and his beak. His feet are 

 comparatively weak. They have nothing like the grip of 

 an Eagle's feet — the grip that kills. 



A writer in the Spectator thus describes the Griffon : 



