West River Eagle

The scoop on Turkey Vultures



My son and I were walking through town last week when thirty Turkey Vultures suddenly rose up from a tree. We hadn’t even realized they were there.  I mean, it was a big tree, but vultures are big birds—and still the only noise was the sound of their wings, a kind of chunky flutter.  We couldn’t help laughing with surprise and then the joy of seeing these big, ungainly birds floating above us so elegantly.

Turkey Vultures aren’t perhaps our most attractive bird. Their heads are bald, and a raw red color, and maybe just a little too small for their bodies. They have this habit called urohydrosis, a more polite way of saying that they pee down their own legs to keep themselves cool.  Like any wild animal, they can leave behind copious amounts of odoriferous waste, especially when they roost in large colonies. Bird control services advertise foggers and lasers and sound systems and even vulture effigies.  (I’ve seen similar attempts to scare off Canada Geese by placing sculptures of dead geese where they congregated. It didn’t work.)

The Turkey Vulture has only two close family members in the United States, the Black Vulture (still mostly a southern bird) and the California Condor, and it is the only vulture found in South Dakota. The Latin family name of these New World Vultures is Cathartidae, which roughly translates a “cleaner” or “purifier.”  This seems a fitting name for a bird that, guided by a strong sense of smell, and protected by a toxic cocktail of bacteria in their digestive tracts, scavenges animal carcasses for food. They keep the countryside clean. 

The Turkey Vulture embodies the complex relationship between humans and birds. Their northward expansion over the last decades is undoubtedly due to a general warming trend, but there are other factors at work. Ornithologist Lawrence Igl and colleagues noted a decline in Turkey Vultures in the northern Great Plains at the end of the nineteenth century as free-ranging bison, a major food source, disappeared. Others have speculated that the vultures more recent return has followed the population explosion in white-tailed deer and increase in traffic over the last five or six decades—more cars plus more deer equals more road kill, and vultures prefer fresh carcasses. As farms have been abandoned, the buildings left behind have become ideal nesting sites where suitable sites are scarce.  We depend on each other in so many ways.

Living in such close proximity to it, vultures conjure images of death. And yet, here in the northern plains, they are one of the earliest spring arrivals; they’ve appeared in my yard just at the equinox for the last three years. Watching them fly, riding the thermals for what seems like forever, as at home in the sky as on the ground, they seem the luckiest of creatures. “Dwarfed transfiguring angels,” poet David Bottoms calls the birds, “with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.”

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