Even the crows and the buzzards draw the eye fondly. The National
Capital is a great place for buzzards, and I make the remark in no
double or allegorical sense either, for the buzzards I mean are black
and harmless as doves, though perhaps hardly dovelike in their tastes.
My vulture is also a bird of leisure, and sails through the ether on
long flexible pinions, as if that was the one delight of his life. Some
birds have wings, others have "pinions." The buzzard enjoys this latter
distinctions. There is something in the sound of the word that suggests
that easy, dignified, undulatory movement. He does not propel himself
along by sheer force of muscle, after the plebeian fashion of the crow,
for instance, but progresses by a kind of royal indirection that
puzzles the eye. Even on a windy winter day he rides the vast aerial
billows as placidly as ever, rising and falling as he comes up toward
you, carving his way through the resisting currents by a slight
oscillation to the right and left, but never once beating the air
openly.

This superabundance of wing power is very unequally distributed among
the feathered races, the hawks and vultures having by far the greater
share of it. They cannot command the most speed, but their apparatus
seems the most delicate and consummate. Apparently a fine play of
muscle, a subtle shifting of the power along the outstretched wings, a
perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equipoise, sustains them
and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art; not
merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another,
but a gift so free and spontaneous that work becomes leisure and
movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, from this perch to
that, as they are abandoning themselves to the mere pleasure of riding
upon the air.