Earthblog

Boredom often couples with the Bizarre. They both love red wine, the taste of a cigarette after a hearty meal, the smell of gasoline, the way a wildfire in the mountains makes the sunset pink. They go for long strolls in blue moonlight punching the crosswalk buttons at empty intersections. They go out for a late dinner at an obscure Thai restaurant you've probably never heard of, and then, on the way back to Boredom's house, they stop by the Village Vidiot; the entertainment mecca for disenchanted, disenfranchised, lonely and eccentric movie-hounds looking for something to do, or more specifically something to watch,something they haven't seen before.

Turkey vultures live in Old Town Fort Collins. Each summer for the past ten years, I’ve seen a venue of vultures circling and roosting in the conifers in front of a recessed residence on West Mountain Avenue. They’re hard to miss. Every evening, some ten or twenty of the giant, red-faced, black-coated raptors roost together in the uppermost boughs of the four blue spruce trees, with a noisy flapping of wings as they settle in. They drop splats of white excrement, flight feathers, and regurgitated pellets on the sidewalk below. Even more difficult to miss (or ignore, especially from a block or two away) are the great birds soaring upward on thermals over the sunlit neighborhood of fine Victorian mansions, massive shade trees, and manicured lawns, swirling like a slow-motion tornado—not nearly as threatening, of course, but for some of us, a tad unnerving nevertheless owing to the vulture’s association with carrion, and thus with DEATH.

The turkey vulture, Cathartes aura, is a native of North America whose summertime range extends coast to coast and as far north as Alberta. Turkey vultures arrive each year in Fort Collins, Colorado—from winters spent in Central America—about the time our ospreys arrive, which is somewhere between April 3-6, by my reckoning. This year, however, I observed both ospreys and vultures on March 28th, the weekend after a big snowstorm that covered the Front Range with some eight inches of snow, and I don’t know yet what their earlier arrival means vis a vis global warming.

American vultures (which include turkey vultures, black vultures, and endangered California condors) are considered to be “birds of prey,” or raptors, but are unique enough in this bunch of meat-eating birds to have been grouped in their own taxonomic family: the Cathartidae (see sidebar). Vultures, also known as buzzards, differ from the other raptors in that their feet and bills aren’t powerful enough to snatch, crush, and kill their prey, so vultures must scavenge off the already-killed. In fact, recent genetic analysis has shown that American vultures are more closely related to storks and ibises than to hawks and eagles. As to the question of whether vultures can smell their food (because who doesn’t want to know?): African and Asian vultures, who are descended from hawks and eagles, are scent-blind to carrion, but in the Americas, vultures do find food by smell as well as by sight.