This but few birds have mastered, and to-day it is rarely to be seen in our islands, for eagles, falcons, and buzzards are, unfortunately, only to be found in a few favoured localities. Happily, however, one may yet realize the delight of watching a soaring buzzard, or raven, among the hills of Westmorland, or in parts of Cornwall and Wales. But to see the past-masters in the art, one must seek the haunts of pelicans, vultures, and adjutant storks. The last-named is perhaps the finest performer of them all. For the first hundred feet or so he rises by rapid and powerful strokes of the wings, and then, apparently without the slightest effort, or the suspicion of a wing-beat, he sweeps round in great spirals, gaining some ten or twenty feet with each gyration, the wings and tail all the while being fully extended and the primary feathers widely separated at their tips. During the first part of every turn he is flying slightly downward: at the end of the descent he sweeps round and faces the wind, which carries him upward. Round, round, he goes, mounting ever higher and higher, until at last he attains a height of perhaps two miles. The adjutant thus goes aloft apparently for the mere delight the movement affords him. But not so with the vulture, who is a close rival in this art. He soars for his very existence, for dead bodies are not to be found everywhere. Possessing powers of sight infinitely greater than ours, he mounts aloft for the purpose of taking observations. If nothing "toothsome" can be seen from his vast range, he turns his attention to the movements of such of his fellows as may be up on the same errand miles away. Should he see one swooping earthwards he instantly tracks him down, and is soon at the feast. This accounts for the mysterious way in which vultures will gather together to the feast, in a place where an hour ago not one was to be seen. A caravan of camels, perchance, is making its toilsome way across a burning desert. One falls by the way. In a few hours its bones will be picked clean by a horde of these ravenous birds. Longfellow sang the song of the vultures hunting in stately verse:-- "Never stoops the soaring vulture On his quarry in the desert, On the sick or wounded bison, But another vulture, watching From his high aerial look-out, Sees the downward plunge and follows, And a third pursues the second, Coming from the invisible ether, First a speck, and then a vulture, Till the air is thick with pinions." [Illustration: Black-game.] Darwin, in his wonderful "Journal of a Voyage Round the World" gives a marvellously vivid word-picture of the largest, and most interesting of all the vultures, the Condor of the Andes--one of the largest of flying birds, having a wing-span of something over nine feet:--