VULTURES 
145 
trees that you had looked up to as very large are suddenly dwarfed. 
The same thrill strikes you when overhead the great wings of the 
vulture spread out and with mighty strokes carry the huge bird in 
wide circles up through the sky; and, as you look down, the turkey 
buzzards sailing below seem little more than circling swallows. 
Vernon Bailey. 
The sight of a single California vulture is more than is vouch¬ 
safed to most naturalists, but in 1894 Mr. Stephens actually en¬ 
countered a flock of twenty-six of these magnificent birds. 
The condor is certainly one of the glories of the splendid state of 
California, and every patriotic naturalist should do his part to enforce 
the law for its protection. 
GENUS CATHARTES. 
325. Cathartes aura (Linn.). Turkey Vulture. 
Whole head and upper part of neck naked, the skin corrugated and 
sparingly bristled; nostrils large, elliptical; wings 
long, pointed, folding to or beyond the short round tail. 
Adults: head hare and crimson in life, bill white ; 
lores and top of head sometimes with wart-like papil¬ 
lae ; neck and under parts dull black; upper parts 
blackish glossed with green and purple, feathers 
broadly edged with grayish brown, secondaries edged 
with gray ; shafts of quills and tail feathers varying 
from pale brown to yellowish white. Young: like Fig. 212. 
adults, but bill and naked skin blackish, brownish margins to wing cov¬ 
erts less distinct. Length: 26-32, extent about 6 feet, wing 20-23, tail 
11-12, bill 1. 
Distribution. — Breeds throughout most of temperate and tropical Amer¬ 
ica, from the Saskatchewan south to Patagonia. 
Eggs. — Laid in a cavern, a cavity between rocks, or a hollow in a log, 
stump, or tree trunk ; 2, white, buffy, or greenish white, more or less 
spotted or blotched with rich brown and purplish gray. 
Food. — Carrion. 
One of the most familiar sights in southern and western skies is 
the dark form of the turkey buzzard circling and soaring on out¬ 
spread wings, its black body figure, as seen from below, set in a 
bordering of gray wing. As the birds float in the sky apparently 
wafted by every passing breeze they are keeping a sharp lookout 
over the land outspread beneath them, and so quickly discover any 
carrion that the ranchmen, who are numbered among their con¬ 
stituents, find it quite unnecessary to bury their offal, depending 
entirely upon the good offices of this self-constituted garbage com¬ 
mittee of Nature’s Board of Health. Along the Columbia River the 
buzzards dispose of the dead fish on the shores. 
From the character of their food and their habit of eating on the 
ground instead of carrying their quarry to a tree, the bills and feet 
