152. STATEN IsLanp INSTITUTE oF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
trees in the Vanderbilt Mausoleum grounds. They are now quite 
large and grow among planted vegetation. 
Mr. Charles W. Leng exhibited a collection of small water 
beetles of the family Haliplide, and spoke of their structure and 
habits. 
Dr. A. W. Callisen stated that last summer he had seen two 
turkey buzzards near Pleasant Plains. He added that during 
the 12 years he spent on his farm near Princeton, N. J., he had 
studied the habits of this bird with much interest : 
The first warm days of April invariably brought a pair which 
returned year after year, and their advent was always hailed with 
joy by the family. Nothing can exceed the grace of the buz- 
zard’s flight. With serrated wings widespread he circles high 
over the fields, now rising now falling, yet with no apparent 
motion of his great flexible pinions, and he will sail around and 
around in a restricted area for hours at a time, casting his shadow 
like a cloud on the waving fields of grain below him. Being gre- 
garious there are always two, and sometimes half a dozen or 
more of these great birds wheeling through space, and apparently 
abandoning themselves to their aerial pastime with tireless ecstasy. 
It has been suggested that what must appear a surfeit of exercise 
is taken to aid the digestion of the enormous amount of carrion 
frequently bolted, and this would appear to be true as they will 
cover the same region for hours. 
This poetry of motion is utterly belied however, by their ter- 
restrial habits as scavengers, for nothing 1s too putrid or vile for 
their rapacious appetites. On my farm I raised hundreds of 
chickens, ducks, and geese, and whenever one of these died as 
poultry will, it was thrown in an old orchard for the buzzards 
who never failed to make short work of it. One summer several 
of our pigs succumbed to hog cholera, and these were dragged to a 
distant field by the edge of the woods, where the buzzards promptly 
devoured them and picked the bones as clean and white as if they 
had been purified by an antiseptic. Armed with an opera glass 
I frequently watched these greedy birds at short range gorging 
themselves, a disgusting but by no means uninteresting sight. 
When disturbed in the ghoulish repast, they expressed their 
displeasure by lifting their wings in a threatening attitude, at 
the same time making a hissing or grunting sound which seemed 
