in dying. They stretch out their necks
along the ground, and roll up their slow eyes at longer intervals. The
buzzards have all the time, and no beak is dropped or talon struck until
the breath is wholly passed. It is doubtless the economy of nature to
have the scavengers by to clean up the carrion, but a wolf at the throat
would be a shorter agony than the long stalking and sometime perchings
of these loathsome watchers. Suppose now it were a man in this
long-drawn, hungrily spied upon distress! When Timmie O'Shea was lost on
Armogosa Flats for three days without water, Long Tom Basset found him,
not by any trail, but by making straight away for the points where he
saw buzzards stooping. He could hear the beat of their wings, Tom said,
and trod on their shadows, but O'Shea was past recalling what he thought
about things after the second day. My friend Ewan told me, among other
things, when he came back from San Juan Hill, that not all the carnage
of battle turned his bowels as the sight of slant black wings rising
flockwise before the burial squad.

There are three kinds of noises buzzards make,--it is impossible to call
them notes,--raucous and elemental. There is a short croak of alarm,
and the same syllable in a modified tone to serve all the purposes of
ordinary conversation. The old birds make a kind of throaty chuckling
to their young, but if they have any love song I have not heard it.
The young yawp in the nest a little, with more breath than noise. It is
seldom one finds a buzzard's nest, seldom that grown-ups find a nest of
any sort; it is only children to whom these things happen by right. But
by making a business of it one may come upon them in wide, quiet canons,
or on the lookouts of lonely, table-topped mountains, three or four
together, in the tops of stubby trees or on rotten cliffs well open to
the sky.

It is probable that the buzzard is gregarious, but it seems unlikely
from the small number of young noted at any time that every female
incubates each year. The young birds are easily distinguished by their
size when feeding, and high up in air by the worn primaries of the older
birds. It is when the young go out of the nest on their first foraging
that the parents, full of a crass and simple pride, make their
indescribable chucklings of gobbling, gluttonous delight. The little
ones would be amusing as they tug and tussle, if one could forget what
it is they feed upon.

One never comes any nearer