Vultures 



This automatic performance is practised even by the youngest 

 fledglings when disturbed in the nest. It certainly is a most ef- 

 fective protection. Petrels also practise it, but not so commonly. 



The turkey buzzard shows a decided preference for warm 

 latitudes, never nesting farther north than New Jersey on the 

 Atlantic coast, though, strangely enough, it has penetrated into 

 the interior so far as British Columbia. Lewis and Clarke met it 

 about the falls of the Oregon, and it is still not uncommon on 

 the Pacific slope. Nevertheless, it is about the shambles of 

 towns in the West Indies and other hot countries that the buz- 

 zard finds life the pleasantest. It has the tropical vice of laziness, 

 so closely allied to cowardliness, and lives 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 battle-fields where their wounded and dead 

 comrades fell, by the gruesome vultures that often were the first 

 to detect a corpse lying unseen among the tall grass. 



As night approaches, one buzzard after another flies toward 

 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 prolonged process of settling to 

 sleep. But, very frequently, the traveller in the South notices 

 buzzards perched, 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 rairi, they often spread 

 their wings over the flues to dry their water-soaked feathers. 

 This spread-eagle attitude is also taken, anywhere the bird hap- 

 pens to be, when the sun comes out after a drenching shower. 



Without exerting themselves to form a nest, the buzzards 

 seek out a secluded swamp, palmetto "scrub," sycamore 

 grove, or steep and sunny hillside, and deposit from one to 

 three eggs, usually two, in the cavity of a stump, or lay them 

 directly on the ground, under a bush, or on a rock — any- 

 where, in fact, that necessity urges. Rotten wood is a favorite 

 receptacle, but the angular bricks of ruined chimneys are not 

 disdained. The eggs are of a dull yellowish white, irregularly 



306 



