THE GRIFFON VULTURE.
Vultur fulvus, Briss.
Has once been obtained in Ireland.
Late in the autumn of 1843, my friend Mr. Yarrell favoured me with the information that he had received a letter from Admiral Bowles, in which this gentleman mentioned having recently seen at Castle Martyr, the seat of the Earl of Shannon, a living vulture, said to have been captured in the county of Cork. From this nobleman, Mr. R. Ball learned that the bird was purchased by his steward for 2s. 6d. of a peasant, who caught it on the sea- shore in that neighbourhood. Its plumage being in good order, tended to indicate that it had not escaped from captivity. His lordship politely offered the bird for the collection in the Garden of the Zoological Society, Dublin, but it died before arrangements were completed for its transmission. By the direction of Lord Shannon, it was carefully stuffed, and then added to the collection in Trinity College, Dublin. It proved to be the Vultur fulvus in adult plumage, as distinguished from V. Kolbii, Daud.* There has been so much confusion about these vultures, that their distribution is differently stated in every work that has come under my notice. M. Scldegel in his Revue Critique des Oiseaux d'Europe, published in 1844, gives at p. 12, as localities for what he terms V. fulvus, Dalmatia and Greece : and for V. fulvus occidentalis, Sardinia and the Pyrenees.
The griffon vulture has not been met with in England or Scotland.
Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus, Linn, [sp.] Temm. vol. iv. p. 587). Two of these birds were seen about the Bristol Channel in October, 1825, and one of them was killed. On the 12th of May, 1841, I met with Egyptian vultures in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, and two days afterwards at the Valley of Sweet Waters, near Constantinople. They were in the beautiful adult plumage in which
A fine specimen of V. Kolbii, shot at the Nile by Henry Callwell, Esq., has
been presented to the Belfast Museum.
