232 
TURKEY VULTURE. 
than ours, and must conclude that the carrion crow, which is 
of less size, has been mistaken for the former. In the history 
which follows, we shall endeavour to make it evident that the 
species described by Ulloa, as being so numerous in South 
America, is no other than the black vulture. The ornitholo- 
gists of Europe, not aware of the existence of a new species, 
have, without investigation, contented themselves with the opi- 
nion that the bird, called by the above-mentioned traveller the 
gallinazo, was the Vultur aura^ the subject of our present his- 
tory. This is the more inexcusable, as we expect in natural- 
ists a precision of a different character from that which distin- 
guishes vulgar observation. If the Europeans had not the op- 
portunity of comparing living specimens of the two species, 
they at least had preserved subjects, in their extensive and 
valuable museums, from which a correct judgment might have 
been formed. The figure in the Planches enluminees^ though 
wretchedly drawn and coloured, Avas evidently taken from a 
stuffed specimen of the black vulture. 
Pennant observes, that the turkey vultures “ are not found 
in the northern regions of Europe or Asia, at least in those 
latitudes which might give them a pretence of appearing there. 
I cannot find them,” he continues, “ in our quarter of the globe, 
higher than the Grison Alps,^ or Silesia,t or at farthest Kalish, 
in Great Poland.”:]: 
Kolben, in his account of the Cape of Good Hope, mentions 
a vulture, which he represents as very voracious and noxious. 
“ I have seen,” says he, many carcasses of cows, oxen, and 
other tame creatures, which the eagles had slain. I say car- 
casses, but they were rather skeletons, the flesh and entrails 
being all devoured, and nothing remaining but the skin and 
bones. But the skin and bones being in their natural places, 
the flesh being, as it were, scooped out, and the wound by 
which the eagles enter the body being ever in the belly, you 
would not, till you had come up to the skeleton, have had the 
* Willughby, Ornithology, p. 67. f Sell wen ckfeidt, av. Silesia, 375. 
I Rzaezyuski, Hist. Nat. Poland, 298. 
