Black Vulture or Carrion Crow (Cathartes Atratus), Volume 2, Plate 102
Audubon painted the vulture on the left and the deer head in 1829. He later cut out the head of the second vulture and the two feet and pasted them onto the composition.
An almost balletic image of suppressed violence. Using the deer head as a prop, Audubon stages the birds’ ferocious nature, creating a series of compositional triangles: the larger one (the outline of the three bodies or partial bodies heaped on top of each other) contains the smaller triangle formed by the birds’ eyes and the triangle formed by the deer’s antlers and the left foot and tail feathers of the second vulture. The Black Vulture figured prominently in Audubon’s ongoing effort to investigate the importance of the sense of smell among birds, the subject of a paper he published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1826.
From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography
[The vultures] also regularly attend the markets and shambles, to pick up the pieces of flesh thrown away by the butchers, and, when an opportunity occurs, leap from one bench to another, for the purpose of helping themselves. Hundreds of them are usually found, at all hours of the day, about the slaughterhouses, which are their favourite resort. They alight on the roofs and chimney-tops, wherever these are not guarded by spikes or pieces of glass, which, however, they frequently are, for the purpose of preventing the contamination by their ordure of the rain water, which the inhabitants of the Southern States collect in tanks, or cisterns, for domestic use. They follow the carts loaded with offal or dead animals, to the places in the suburbs where these are deposited, and wait the skinning of a cow or horse, when in a few hours they devour its flesh, in the company of the dogs, which are also accustomed to frequent such places. On these occasions, they fight with each other, leap about and tug in all the hurry and confusion imaginable, uttering a harsh sort of hiss or grunt, which may be heard at a distance of several hundred yards.