In Praise of Vultures

I was helping a friend move an old cast iron claw-footed bathtub/koi pond to his house in southern Maryland. We slid the monster out of the bed of my truck and manhandled it to a prominent spot in the front yard. As we rested from our labors, I heard a deep flapping sound overhead, very much like the rotor noise of a very slow helicopter. A black vulture labored overhead to come to a precarious stop in a leafless walnut tree. "Oh, him", said my friend, "they always come to the birdbath for a drink." I get chickadees and sparrows at my birdbath; he gets vultures...cool. This one, judging from its grey legs and bald black head was a (wait for it) black vulture as opposed to the more common red-headed turkey vulture. Either way, they are both amazing animals.




Vultures are very low energy animals. In the mornings they can be seen with their backs to the sun, wings spread, absorbing solar radiation to heat them up. When they fly, they rarely flap, preferring to glide from updraft to updraft. Sailplane pilots call it "riding the thermals" and often look for vultures to share an updraft of air. This is a risky business; if the updraft runs out, the vulture can and will flap. Sailplanes can't.


Black vultures are among the very few animals which mate for life and are, as far as we know, completely monogamous. I guess when you are a vulture, a little something on the side is pretty much out of the question anyway. Black vultures are a bit smaller than turkey vultures and can be told at distance by their white wing patches and the flat cast of their wings while soaring. Turkey vultures ("TVs") to the initiated, hold their wings in a shallow V. Both species constantly trim and adjust wings and long primary flight feathers to catch every morsel of breeze.


Both species have bald, featherless heads, the better to feed on yucky carcasses without fouling their feathers. Black vultures have the curious habit of defecating on their legs. This keeps them cool and serves as a barrier to any parasites that might be still around the dearly departed lunch. Both black and TVs nest in hollow logs on the forest floor and raise two or three young a year. Stories of vultures carrying off small children and pets don't hold water since their claws are too weak to hold much more than a pound or two. Vultures do, however, possess a potent defence; they projectile vomit. A friend who had it happen to her said she would have rather been clawed or bitten; duh...a half pint of semi-digested rotten meat would be enough to put any predator off thoughts of making a meal of a vulture...forever.


Turkey vultures have the most percentage of their brains devoted to smell of any known animal. T. rex comes a distant second. They are exquisitely sensitive to the odor of mercaptans, a common component of rotting meat, and the same odor the gas company adds to odorless natural gas. The human nose can detect mercaptans in vanishingly small amounts but vultures have us beat all hollow. Gas company trouble-shooters look for vultures circling above underground gas mains to find leaks. Black vultures are not quite as adept in the olfactory department as are TVs. They ride the updrafts and keep their cousins in sight. When the TVs drop down to a carcass, the more aggressive black vultures will drive them away and claim the food for themselves.


Until recently it was thought that New World vultures, including condors, were related to birds of prey as are Old World vultures. DNA testing has shown that our vultures are more closely related to storks than to hawks. Seems a tad poetic; one stork brings you in to the world, another may see you out.