Birps oF PREY. 163 
their attacking them. Certainly the farmer does not 
concern himself about such a possibility. If young 
animals are attacked they are very helpless and have 
probably been abandoned as dead. It may be that 
they do not prefer putrid flesh, but they have been 
known to be so extremely deliberate in eating a 
skinned carcass that it was very “loud” before the 
bones were picked clean. 
The discussion whether the sense of smell or that 
of sight is the vulture’s guidance in finding its food 
has been brought to a close of late by the present 
general admission that they are chiefly guided by 
their piercing eyesight. Of course we will always 
meet with those who will maintain the contrary. 
Every positive statement is met thus, even the sim- 
plest and most obvious facts being daily contradicted. 
It is pure kindness to the bird that it has no keen 
sense of smell, and the law that has operated and is 
operating to bring the varied forms of life into exist- 
ence could never have evolved a sensitive-nostrilled 
carrion-feeder. The food must be sweet or the sense 
of smell deadened. The conditions that operated to 
produce an appetite for carrion, or even a willingness to 
eat it, called necessarily for a loss of the sense of smell. 
I spent the greater part of the month of Septem- 
ber, 1888, in Adams County, Ohio, encamped at the 
“Serpent Mound.” The turkey-buzzards were ex- 
traordinarily abundant, and I was then struck with 
two peculiarities I had never noticed in these birds 
as I had observed them in New Jersey. They were 
continually croaking, and almost as distinctly as 
crows; and when the water in Brush Creek was low 
