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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.
From great heights, conserving energy by soaring on warm rising currents of air, turkey vultures troll the skies looking for carcasses abandonned along highways or by predators. With wings tilted up and long primary feathers spread, their V shapes rock gently as kites. When they spy an unmoving creature, they descend quickly, snuffling the air for those come-hither odors of putrefaction (including mercaptans, the “smell” added to gas so that we can detect gas leaks). I imagine that turkey vultures are as powerless against the hot aromas of rotting flesh as I am against the stench of freshly baked bread. In reality, however, vultures prefer fresh meat, but often must wait a few days carcass-side for a tough hide to soften enough for their small, ineffectual beaks to puncture through to the more delectable organs. They won’t eat carcasses “in advanced stages of putrefaction,” but it’s frankly concerning enough to me that there are, evidently, stages of putrefaction, and that some stages of putrefaction are more palatable than others.
Before we leap to judge the vulture as a vile, gross, disgusting, repulsive and lazy consumer of dead things, let us ask ourselves this: If not the vulture, then who? Somebody’s gotta clean up, right? Everything living must die, and everything that dies gets recycled. So why not help the maggots and beetle larvae dispose of putrid cadavers, recycle the precious nutrients back into the food chain? Why not the turkey vulture, whose alimentary canal is like an acid bath that destroys viruses, parasites, and bacteria—even anthrax—ingested with the putrefying flesh; whose excrement is considered by the Turkey Vulture Society to be so “sanitized and sanitizing” that vultures intentionally shit upon their own legs to cleanse carcass-rot from between the toes (as well as to cool themselves)? Why not a venue of patient, airborne, carrion-eaters, who tirelessly and silently search the countryside at speeds up to 15 mph, who ask nothing in return for their ecologically beneficial work, and who don’t carry on about it like a boisterous murder of crows?
In fact vultures are “voiceless”—they lack syringes (singular, “syrinx”). Aside from shuffling their wings at night when they gather in large groups to roost, they don’t make much noise at all. When they do utter sounds, their vocalizations are “soft hissing, clucking, and whining.” I have heard vultures hiss but I’ve never heard them “cluck” or “whine.” I heard the harsh, airy hiss—it didn’t sound “soft” to me—many years ago at a raptor center where I used to work. A two-foot tall vulture threatened me with hisses as she stood on the ground, shoulders hunched, head lowered, and showing her tongue. The hissing sounded like a snake. I nervously shoveled the soiled gravel into a bucket and left quickly, only later wondering, What was I afraid of? Being pecked on the knee by a dull beak?
Please note that I’m not alone in my fears. In the Q & A section of the Turkey Vulture Society’s website (http://VultureSociety.homestead.com), somebody worried about letting a small dog outside, alone, into the yard because of the vultures often seen overhead. The Vulture Society responded that vultures “are not at all interested in moving animals. They will descend on something that is lying still, and will only approach if it smells decayed. These peaceful animals will pose no risk to your animals or children.” So, basically, as long as we still walk among the living, vultures just aren’t that scary.
Peaceful creatures they may be. But there’s still something edgy about animals who are so closely associated with DEATH. And they are huge, with a five-foot seven-inch wingspan that’s wider across than I am tall. And they do joyfully devour rotting flesh. And they do plunge their heads neck-deep into bloody stinking carcasses. They’re kind of. . . gross. Until, that is, we look at them more closely.
The vulture’s head is famously naked of feathers, giving the appearance of a small-headed bald man, hunched in a trench coat, who’d been out in the sun so long his pate turned lobster-red. The cross-the-skull wrinkles aren’t what I’d call beautiful, but the deep brown eyes with their round pulsing pupils sparkle with a certain alertness, a particular intelligence and long-range consciousness that is inexplicably charismatic, and the short white beak is smooth and pretty as alabaster or moonstone. The nostrils communicate, under a waxy knob of noseflesh called a “cere,” so that, when viewed in profile, one can peer directly through one nostril, into the other, and out the other side, much like peeping through an old-fashioned keyhole. Everything about this raptor’s head is optimized for convenient after-dinner clean-up. The featherless head prevents the accumulation of dried clots, bacteria, parasites, maggots, and other cling-ons; the smooth bill allows blood and other assorted carrion juices to be easily wiped off; the special architecture of nostrils means that stinking gobbets of flesh can’t plug up one of the bird’s most important food-finding organs. Smart!
But one might wonder how a carrion-eater fares in Old Town Fort Collins. Fort Collins is not exactly an open range strewn with the bloated carcasses of wayward cattle. It’s not exactly the kind of place where people leave hit-by-car pets to decompose in the gutters, or where large predators like wolves bring down deer for which the carrion-eaters wait patiently in the figurative bleachers.
Fort Collins is a wholesome, mid-sized river city where you almost expect Wally and the Beaver (or Lance Armstrong, or Barack Obama, or Melissa Ethridge) to come running around the corner of Mountain and College, where City Drug has sold Jobst stockings and scented candles for fifty years, with scoops of Walrus icecream dripping over the cones and down their hands—and, when the drippings hit the sidewalk, they reach down with napkins to rub clean the pavement. Fort Collins is the kind of place where most citizens would call Animal Control to remove dead skunks from our yards. So how are vultures finding enough to eat here? From what source are they getting the calories they need to flap their slow, clumsy wings until they run into those thermals that will carry them a thousand feet up; to keep a little muscle and fat on their svelte four-pound bodies; and to feed their quickly-growing vulturettes all summer?
A clue comes from one of my bird books. Evidently, the ever-adaptable, opportunistic vulture will eat any dead thing from the size of a tadpole on up. Fort Collins has marshes full of frogs all along the Poudre River. I’m sure tadpoles meet bad ends every day as waterlines retreat in the heat of summer and as ponds and puddles dry up. Even some of our backyards have “fish ponds” that must attract amphibians and other tadpole-sized critters. Vultures are not fussy prima donnas. And when you’re not picky, the world is your banquet.
The Turkey Vulture Society website confirmed this information and gave me an exciting new tidbit to chew as well, stating that, in the absence of carrion, vultures may eat small live animals—such as weak passerine nestlings—or even vegetables, such as opened pumpkins or cracked coconuts. Pumpkins and coconuts!
Another clue came from paying a visit to the Mountain Ave vultures who roost in the quartet of blue spruces. Strewn across the needle duff were the whitewashed fecal splats, regurgitated pellets, and feathers shed from the roosting kettle of vultures above. Among this vulture spoor lay a supine Fox squirrel in quiet repose at the base of one of the spruces, almost as if some thoughtful human had recently placed it there. Aha! Squirrels! Squirrels are everywhere, and everywhere the poor bot-ridden darlings are squashed by automobiles, and hardly anybody—not even hip vegan college students—will call Animal Control to pick up squirrels. And Aha! again—someone placed the squirrel here for the vultures, didn’t they? And didn’t I just read on the Vulture Society website, under the heading, “How to Attract Vultures,” that starting a “vulture restaurant” is one way to help out the struggling suburban vulture?
While I was inspecting the squirrel at the vulture roost on Mountain Ave, and admiring the long elegant primary feathers that had fallen, like slick black angel-feathers, from above, a neighbor came out of her house. She turned on the hose to water her side-yard while her husband was working on their car over by the garage. I asked if she knew the person who lived here with the vultures, and if so, did she think that person would mind if I took a few feathers?
“Absolutely not, take all you want,” said the neighbor, a fit and friendly fifty-something-year old whose husband, it turns out, had been born in the vulture house. After asking them for how long the vultures had been coming, each summer, to this roost, the couple smiled and said, “All our lives,” which, in the husband’s case, meant seventy years.
I lifted an especially lovely shit-spattered vulture feather off the duff and the woman asked if I wanted a bag to put the feathers in. Such an affable and helpful neighbor! I declined the offering but picked out a few more feathers, stuck them in my bike’s pannier, and asked if she liked the vultures.
“Sure,” she said. “They’re quiet enough, only really hear them at night when they make that flapping noise as they settle their wings. But when it rains, I guess we’re not too keen on them, because of the smell.” She indicated the droppings and soiled duff, the pellets, the bits of previous meals, the dead squirrel.
“What does it smell like after a rain?”
“Poop and puke.”
“How many are up there? How many come in to roost every night?”
She gave some estimates in the twenties, then said, with a nod to her husband who was fussing over something by their car, “Once, a couple of years ago, he lost count after one hundred and thirty.”
“One hundred and thirty turkey vultures? Here? In these four trees?”
“Yes,” she said, “And in some of the trees over there,”—pointing east toward Washington, a cross-street.
I rode my bicycle home (pannier stuffed with vulture feathers) thinking, Wowie, a hundred and thirty! It seems that vultures are faring quite well in this vulture-friendly city. It’s hard to believe—especially considering a bird count like that, and regular sightings of turkey vultures twirling overhead or sitting on fence posts along the Poudre River Trail—that one study (admittedly, from 1988) found that a fifth of all turkey vultures in the U.S. die each year. A twenty-percent death rate for the vulture population seems awfully high. Accidents? Poisonings? Starvation in cities that don’t have vulture restaurants?
Vultures are monogamous and each year produce, on average, only two eggs (white, occasionally with brown marks), which are laid ascetically on the bare ground or in a hollow in rock or log. Incubation takes about 40 days. Kind of a rough start for the chicks. No downy-soft bassinet of a nest for the plucking-ugly vulture baby, and, when they hatch, they get to look forward to meals of “regurgitant.” Regurgitant differs from vomitus in that the ingested material stays in the upper, pre-
gastric, alimentary tract and is not accompanied by abdominal presses, nausea, or hypersalivation. In other words, vomited food is brought up with force from the stomach and upper intestine and is mixed with gastric juices and bile; regurgitated food is stored in the esophagus or in an outpouching of the esophagus, such as the “crop” of birds—it never makes it as far as the stomach—and then it’s simply, gently, lovingly, poured out. Regurgitation for the sake of the youngsters—wolves do it, and pigeons make a “crop milk”—must therefore be not quite as unpleasant an activity as vomition. Certainly it’s less athletic. And it’s an energy-smart solution to the problem of how to transport food from the source—uh, carcass—back to the hungry clutch of flightless chicks.
However, vulture regurgitant is, to be quite blunt, dead putrid flesh that was yanked off the skeleton of a cadaver, devoured, then partially-digested in the parent’s crop and flown home. (It is not the same thing as the regurgitated “pellet”—see sidebar). The parent bird regurgitates this vile slurry into the open gullets of their hungry youngsters, who push each other out of the way in their attempts to get it all for themselves. Personally, I can’t imagine a more unpleasant meal. Once, many winters ago when I lived eight miles up a curvy gravel road, my dog puked rotted, maggoty chunks of deer meat onto the passenger-side floor of my truck. It was cold and snowing so all the windows were up. The odors were so foul I nearly vomited, too. Anyway, that’s basically what baby vultures get to grow big and strong on.
The oldest living turkey vulture is a San Francisco Zoo resident named “Toulouse,” who is thirty-three years old. In the wild, they most certainly don’t live that long (it’s possible that the oldest vulture recorded in the wild was about sixteen), but the wild vulture trades safety and longevity for the singular beauty and freedom of the skies. And truly, there are few things more magnificent than a kettle of vultures soaring on thermals on a hot summer afternoon over West Mountain Avenue. There are few sights more awe-inspiring than a venue of vultures perched on a fence post and catching in their outstretched wings the morning’s first light alongside the Poudre River Trail, just west of Shields Street, where someone tends a flourishing iris garden—into which vultures deposit sanitized droppings and fertilizing morsels of carrion.
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