Ode to the Turkey Vulture

When and where I grew up turkey vultures were always called “buzzards.” I was probably 40 before I learned their proper common name.

I was a small-town/farmer-lite girl so I’ve known how to identify a vulture in flight since I was probably 10, but I’ve only relatively recently considered that their wing position offers vultures something other than just a place to put their wings. Those wings held in the recognizable V allow these huge birds with their six-foot wingspans to coast along on the thermals, letting them conserve energy as they look for and then circle over their food on the ground.

Although they appear black against the sky, when you see a turkey vulture at ground level, up-close and personal, as I often do these days, you notice some lighter streaks on their wings sometimes.  At least a few of the vultures in my current neck of the woods have very light wing tips, looking like they’ve donned white dinner gloves in dressy anticipation of their upcoming feast of tasty squirrel, possum or other dead, stinking morsel.  Along with that set of impressive black wings, one of the most recognizable features of the turkey vulture, is of course, that fleshy red head, resembling, of course, a turkey’s.

According to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources “committee” is the collective noun for a group of perching vultures. Gathering in committee, creating a brand, thinking about lunch. The DNR also reports that turkey vultures are protected by state and federal law under the USA by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.  So, don’t go vulture hunting. Cause I WILL turn you in.

Indiana’s ornithological types have been taking note of turkey vultures since at least 1892. That year Amos William Butler wrote in The Birds of Indiana: With Illustrations of Many of the Species that vultures were “common summer residents” in the northern part of the state but when “winters are severe they are sometimes absent for a few weeks. . . The people think very much of them and protect them.”

Vultures seemed rare in my youth but are common in my maturity, especially in my current locale. I can recall the first time I saw one circling over the city when I lived in Indianapolis, close to 20 years ago now. I was shocked then, but it’s not an uncommon sight these days, in the era of global climate change. And it seems like highly adapted behavior really. There are lots of dead things in the city. 

I see them at least weekly here in my life on the river. They are the clean sweepers of my rural world. And they’re some of my favorite photographic subjects. Perched on tree limbs or indulging in a fresh or festering dead critter, these guys fascinate me.

In my amateur birder world, I’ve noticed that vultures tend to hang in committees of two most of the time when they’re snacking or perched. But they often soar in larger graceful groups. They can soar high, high in the sky as they scout for dinner because the vulture has one of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom. They can detect the “plume” of rotting flesh even when it’s in the weensiest concentration of particles mixed in the atmosphere. A few parts per billion of stinky dead possum odor in the air sends up an alluring aroma to these guys on the lookout for their next meal. Studies have shown that they can find a dead critter within a few hours of its demise, even if it’s buried under leaves or otherwise not visible. The turkey vulture’s lamer cousin, the black vulture, is not nearly so well-endowed in the smell sense.  Turkey vultures rule in the world of flying smellers.

Adding to the turkey vulture’s aural arsenal is their also amazingly acute vision. A study comparing the turkey vulture's eyesight to their cousin's, the black vulture’s, determined that the red-heads had just as densely packed visual receptors as their far less smell-efficient cousins. So they see as well and smell a lot better. Turkey vultures are winners with the right stuff.

The turkey vulture is a member of the order Falconiformes, which also includes hawks, eagles, kites, harriers, osprey, falcons.  Some common traits found in this order are hooked beaks, sharp talons, that keen vision and a hind toe which opposes the other toes – functioning somewhat like our thumbs. Traveling deeper into taxonomic order, these birds are within the family of New World Vultures called the Cathartidae. This includes the California condor, the Andean condor and the king vulture of Central and South America. Cathartes aura is the scientific name specific to the turkey vulture.  Cathartes means “purifier”; aura’s synonyms in the dictionary are “atmosphere, ambience, air, quality, character, mood, feeling, feel, flavor.”  Vultures are atmospheric purifiers, a flying cleaning crew. And for this I thank them.

I do, in fact, feel mightily thankful for the work of the vulture. Just recently, when the momma fox I’d been watching raise a family of kits was hit by a damn car, I tried to avoid driving the road where her lifeless body lay so that I wouldn’t feel so dreadfully sad each time I saw her there squished. But three days later, I forgot and instinctively headed down my familiar trek only to see vultures gathered in their scavenging committee around that dead mom fox’s body. 

And I felt better.  Her death was no less tragic, but now I saw that it wasn’t wasteful. Her body fed all those vultures. In the end, what was left of her probably also fed a million microorganisms, but it was the vultures who brought the circle of her life to a close for me.

Living as I do in a house in the country with two aging cats, a river on one side and clover fields on the other, I’ve decided that if one of my cats dies while I’m still in this house, I won’t bury him. I’ll take his body into the fields and give him to the vultures. He’ll have a second use, like the fox. I’ll watch for the vultures circling overhead and know that he’s part of the circle of life, too.  If it were legal, I’d tell my sons to do the same with me. Put my body in the woods, sing a poem over me and then watch the sky for my last hurrah.

On pain and tragedy and beauty and life on the river.

I moved to this little cottage for a one-year experiment in country/river’s edge living. Actually, I had set myself the even shorter challenge of staying at least six months. Sticking it out for six months was going to be my minimum goal to count the experiment as a success.

Four years later, I’ve learned a thing or two. For one, I love this place. I’m not necessarily “in love” with it as I was for the first year or two, but I do still deeply love it. It is a relationship, me with this cottage on the river. We’ve had our ups and our downs, this place and I.

There are unexpected challenges to living here. So much of what I love, the beauty of being so close to nature, carries with it the constant potential for tragedy. Just last week I saw again the red fox that I’ve so enjoyed watching as she raised her yearly den of kits in a ditch pipe along one of the county roads. I’ve been worried about those kits because I’ve had to stop for them more than once driving home at night. Today I saw the adult fox dead on the side of the road. God damn. Humans cause so much death out here. Are her babies grown enough to survive alone yet? I hope so.

I think we are probably the worst of what nature has to offer.

And I’ve seen a human die here, too.  The winter of 2014, I saw a man drown in the cold, rushing waters of the Flatrock. I had watched this guy acting peculiarly in the woods across the river. Shouting, walking up and down the hills, falling down. Then I saw him down by a canoe that had sat down by the river unused for the two years I’d lived there. I’d wondered several times how that canoe managed to stay there, close to the river, and not get carried away in a flood. But it hadn’t and now that goofy-acting man was over near it.  And I was worried. I knew no one could get a canoe safely into the river at the speed it was flowing on that sleeting December day.

I went to my computer and sent a Facebook message to the canoe owner across the river. Then I walked back into the kitchen and looked out again. The guy was in the river, in the canoe, and in water up to his midsection. The canoe had swamped immediately. I called 911. 

“Some dumbass has put a canoe in the river and now he’s in the water. There’s no way he can get it out of there.  He’s headed to the dam in Geneva” I told the operator. But by the time I hung up, and in one of those very clear moments that you later wonder how you managed, I realized the police couldn’t possibly get there in time to save him. That the water was too cold and he’d have hypothermia very quickly, that I couldn’t reach him because he was across the river, but that maybe I could drive to the end of my road, race down to the river and yell at him to grab something. I knew that he could not be thinking clearly and maybe not thinking at all. I thought if I could yell at him and maybe shock him into clarity, I could show him where he could grab something and maybe he’d be able to get out of this.

So, I did that. I put on my shoes, grabbed a coat and got in my car, drove as fast as I could to the end of the road. I was thinking I’ll get Chuck out of his house and he’ll help me and maybe we can hold out a big branch or something. But I knew when I got out of my car that there wasn’t time to get help from Chuck. 

I heard the guy in the river yelling: “Help. . .Help”. I ran down the hill toward the water and saw his head bobbing above the current as he rolled along with it. I shouted “I’m here” as I ran down the hill. And then he went under. And he didn’t come back up.

A few other people came out of their homes within a few seconds but we couldn’t see him. He was gone.

The police came and someone said there were TV trucks on the bridge at Geneva and I should go tell them what I saw, but after I talked to the police I went home. I knew that if someone had seen my son drown and didn’t save him I would hate that person. It wouldn’t matter that there was nothing that could be done. I wouldn’t ever forgive someone who hadn’t saved my son. And I just couldn’t bear knowing I’d be the person his parents hated.

Months later they found his body. In the meantime I learned that he wasn’t a good guy. Convicted child molester. But, as the police detective said during the second phone call he made to me to ask again about what I’d seen, “he was still someone’s son.”

Ugh. Yes. I saw someone’s son die in that river I love. He had been looking for his white pit bull in the woods before he got in the water. They found the dog the next day.

That winter was hard. Isolated. It was beautiful and frosty outside. I didn’t want to be here. In the spring they found his body just around the bend from where I saw him go under.

The next year I decided to spend winter in the city, rented a house from a friend and left the river behind. I missed it, but not enough to stay even for a weekend.

But when I came back in the spring. I knew I loved it again.  There’s still tragedy here, but there’s tremendous beauty, too. And a chance to see and be part of life --- and death --- in ways I never experienced in the city.

We’ve weathered bad seasons, this little cottage and I. We’re no longer in the budding of our love affair. The bloom is mature. We’ve been through some shit.  But again this year as I returned home from winter in the city, the beauty of all there is here outside my door has me happy again that I’m back.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay at this little house on the river. It’s not a good place to be disabled or old, or tender-hearted. But it is a good place to be me for now.  For my soul for now. And for now I’m staying.

Namaste, River.

Today I was lazy like a cat. Stretched out in the sun on my homemade dock, I drank the tea from Speedway and read. Then, I pulled myself up for the walk back into the house and put on a couple bits of unmatched swimsuit, picked up one of the inflated tubes and a rope, walked back to the dock, tied the rope to the dock through the open space between two deck boards, made a loop in the rope, slid the tube into the water and myself into the tube, put my foot though that loop and . . . floated.

The normally still Flatrock was currenty and wanted to float me into the now-blooming-in-pale-blue weeds along the river’s edge. I made another loop at the very end of the rope, put my foot through that one and spent an hour or more letting the current push me toward the dock. Then I’d push off again with one foot and swoop outward, stretching the rope to its fullest length. Then float back again to the shore. And so it went. Push swoop float. Push swoop float. Push swoop float.  Roll over on my belly, push with my hand this time, then swoop float. Push swoop float.

The turtles on the log across the river ignored me. At first the leathery soft-shells slid into the water as they always do, rightfully alarmed by the presence of human. But the quiet, push, swoop float was so softly felt in their world that they eventually emerged and climbed right back up on the log, rejoining their always braver hard-shelled cousins who weren’t scared into taking a dive just because a human showed up in the neighborhood.

A fish jumped out of the water behind me once. A little one nibbled on my leg where it lay just below the water surface once.

I cried a minute or two from the beauty of it. For quite a while I didn’t think about people, or about me, or about how I was doing nothing but what I was doing, which was nothing. I knew the beauty of those moments while I was living them.

  

Namaste river. 

You have god in you.

Hard Winter at the River and then Spring

Toads tunneled into the dirt

Trees stripped to the bone

Turtles sank beneath the muck

And so did I.

Green things and brown things

All the feathered things

Hid from that winter

Death arrived on the Flatrock, figurative and literal

Cruel to beast and man and watcher

Happiness mourned for the warmth

Time waited buried in snow and sleet

Bleak was the winter’s adjective

Endless the object of every sentence.

A frigid holiday forgot its gifts

No cheer as Christ’s day came and went

Come the New Year, still no relief.

Headlights dimmed in the cold

Pipes froze in the basement

Coyotes howled in the night

Winter poked and jabbed

Trees fell at its feet

All the live things shriveled, wondering how to survive

And so did I.

...

And yet I did. . .

...

At last, spring has bidden the sun

And the turtles onto logs

Tree frogs revived, proclaiming their survival.

Icy gray to verdant green
The river runs freely again
No man beneath its frozen surface.

Snakes dance across the grass
Weeds fight with wildflowers for dirt hegemony

At last the bluebirds came back to their happiness.

And so did I.

And so did I.

Duck Love

Pretty hard to get a photo from the road, but see the white duck there
on the other side of the river? Brown duck is right beside it to the right
his pale bill is barely discernible.

Two weeks ago as I drove home from a day on the Northside of Indianapolis, I took the long way, as I usually do, so I could drive along the river. Not long after my turn onto the river road, I saw something white swimming in the river upstream from the falls.  A huge white duck. It acted fidgety, swimming this way then that.

Peculiar, I thought.

The next evening Bill came out to have an after work kayak.  As we’re paddling along – still downstream from the falls, I caught movement on the river bank in my peripheral vision. It was a hefty brown duck.

It walked to the bank’s edge and quacked at us.  I quacked back. “Wack, wack,” it said. “Wack, wack,” I said. It jumped into the river. And swam right up to my kayak.  I was super impressed with my duck wack, wacking skills. Bill said that the duck must be tame. No wild duck would do that. 

Peculiar, I thought.

It was a fine specimen of a large brown duck with teal on the wing. It looked like a female mallard, but had curly tail feathers, which I have always thought indicated a drake. Hard to sex a duck from a kayak.

Anyway, that duck swam along with us, and as we sped up to navigate the now-shallow rapids, it sped up, swimming as fast as its duck feet could paddle. 

We got out at the rapids to pull our kayaks where the river was too shallow, splashing over this spot where there are boulders on the river bottom. The duck splashed over, too.  Splat, splat on the watery rocks, navigating by foot as we did. Right beside us. I could have reached down and patted his little duck head he was that close.

Very peculiar.

Back in the kayaks for the short paddle up to the falls. Duck bringing up the rear still.  At the falls, we portaged the kayaks to wade around on the exposed rocks of the flat limestone river bed. Splashing over the rocks with the duck splat splatting along beside us.

Then I remembered something. In addition to seeing that huge white duck the night before, I had seen a spot near the falls where someone had dumped out birdseed, and where there were a lot of feathers.

Hm. Light bulb.

I looked up river and there it was, the white duck, still in the very same spot where I’d noticed it the evening before. I told Bill that I thought he was right. Clearly my brown duck was imprinted on humans and he thought I was his human. I wondered to Bill, do you think someone might have let these two ducks loose here where the birdseed and the feathers are and they got separated somehow? Maybe they know each other. Hm.

So, we started wading toward the white duck. Splat, splat on the rocks came the brown duck. Bill asked, “How far are you going?”  Me: “just far enough for them to see each other and see if they recognize each other.”  Bill: “Ok.”

We waded and waded a bit more. We were getting closer to the white duck but my brown duck hadn’t seen it yet.

Then, one of them quacked. “Wack, wack.” Then the other “wack, wack.”  Wack, wack. Wack, wack, wack, wack!  And my brown duck set off swimming to that white duck like he was shot out of a water cannon.  And that white duck awkwardly waddled at high speed to the end of his log and fell into the water and set off swimming to the brown duck.  

Swim, swim, swim, swim ducks.

And then they met. And then they MET.  Brown duck was much faster than white duck so they were pretty far upriver when it happened, but we could see the duck recognition, duck relief, duck “oh my god, I didn’t know where you went! I’ve found you!” 

Duck love. As they swam around and around each other.

Bill and I waded back to our kayaks, looking back every few seconds to watch the ducks paddle and circle with each other in the river.

When I got home, I googled “what do ducks eat,” wondering if I should drop off some sort of food to them until they acclimated to the environment. The sites I found said ducks are omnivores. They’ll eat anything—and there are plenty of anythings in the Flatrock River for them: minnows, weeds, algae, bugs.  It will be a good diet.

Every day since that day I have driven past or walked up the road to check on my ducks.  They’re still there.  Never more than a foot from each other. At first they stayed very near white duck’s log. But now they swim more freely. I’ve seen them checking out some of the inlets. I’ve seen them on the other side of the river, and up and downstream from their log. I think they have good duck lives. Together.

I don't know if they are a male and a female couple, or two ducks of the same sex who are duck friends, but I know they've found each other again. And I know I have seen duck love.

Today, they are at the falls. An odd duck couple. Still together. 

A River's Ancient Stone.

The Flat Rock River is less than 800 feet above sea level in Shelby County, Indiana. The river travels along and through outcroppings of limestone much of the way from Decatur to Shelby County. I’m a geology nerd and there are incredibly beautiful, very non-Indiana looking spots on the Flat Rock where rock meets river and runs along beneath the water.

In 1862, a geologist wrote that the origin of the name “Flat Rock” for this river couldn’t be explained. Apparently that geologist didn’t wade along the limestone bed or travel down through the terraced cliffs or outcropped banks that attracted me here. Those rocky outcroppings and the flat stone bed of the river are a big part of what drew me to this place. 

Still that mid-19^th century geologist knew a lot that I don’t about the rock of this area. In his Report of a Geological Reconnaissance of Indiana Made during the Year 1859 he had this to say about the stone of the Flat Rock. “The Upper Silurian provides good building material on the Flat Rock in Shelby County. Junction of Upper Silurian and Devonian is found in the quarries in the valley of the Flat Rock. The silicious limestone in the beds of the Flat Rock did not afford many fossils." A “southerly dip was quite perceptible in the bed of the Flat Rock; at an old dam, the rocks were much rippled, marked and grooved by the wearing effects of the water running here with the strike. Immense quantities of chert and confervae covered some portions."

 The 1880 Atlas of Shelby County, Indiana noted that “in the extreme southeast corner of Shelby County… the face of the country is rolling and undulating, and the land is well watered by numerous streams. Flat Rock, Conn’s Creek, Lewis Creek, Tough Creek and Duck Creek are the principal. Part of St. Paul is in Shelby County … on the west bank of the Flat Rock River. At this point are located the famous limestone quarries, from which stone is shipped all over the country. The stone for the new State House of Indiana and for the United States Custom House in Cincinnati is from this quarry.”

According to the Indiana Geological Survey, the name “Geneva Limestone” was used in 1882 to describe the exposures of buff dolomitic limestone along the Flat Rock River near Geneva, Shelby County, Ind. The same rocks were later called the Shelby Bed. More recently the term Geneva Dolomite Member, part of the Jeffersonville Limestone has been used for this rock. “The Geneva Dolomite Member is massive to thick-bedded in its lower part and more commonly thin-bedded in its upper part. The distinctive colors are due to a high organic content, and near-surface beds are commonly oxidized to pale tan, cream, or even white. White crystalline, coarsely cleavable calcite masses, ranging from 1 inch to more than 1 foot in cross section, resulting from calcification of fossils, are scattered through the fine-grained dolomite matrix. Chert is present in some sections, and quartz sand is especially common in basal rocks.” 

By 1876, the limestone of this county was already appreciated as a building material. That year a History of Shelby County, Indiana reported that “The river beds furnish us with a most excellent substance for the construction of turnpike roads; and to what extent our people have availed themselves of it may be seen in such facts as these, that fifteen different travel roads center in Shelbyville, and that there are almost two hundred miles of turnpike in the county!”

It looks like the stone has been harvested along the banks of the river near my house. There are literally blocks of stone on the banks. Maybe that happens naturally, or maybe it’s leftover from when early homebuilders here took advantage of a rocky river bank to chunk off foundation stone.  Road builders hauled stone from my river to build their turnpikes. Pioneers nearby managed to harvest slabs big enough to make a porch (out of one huge rock) for their fine stone house in the 1850s.

That stone has been useful to and used by humans for as long as humans have been here, I’m sure. But it’s ancient stone. It was formed from the deposition of critters who lived in our shallow inland sea in the Upper Silurian to the Devonian periods---that’s more than 400 million years ago. 

And after that shallow sea receded, the glaciers came and went and their melt-off carved out this river valley, leaving behind, when they receded, this beautiful peaceful river. And the 400 million year-old limestone that runs beneath it.

  

Seasons. Changes.

Sunset on the non-river side of the road.

There's a moon dog tonight. I don't see them very often but it's the second one I've noticed since I moved here. As I turned toward home from my quick walk at sunset, that moon dog set me thinking about what has happened "in the valley" as my neighbor, Dave, calls our road, since I moved.  Many changes.

It was minus 12 degrees on January 30th, the day I moved. Blistering cold and blustering winds. My water pipes froze three times in that first month. It was cool inside but not much cooler than in my old house in the city. It was beautiful out the back windows.

I watched the black and white feral cat who lives somewhere, or maybe everywhere, around here cross and recross the frozen river, leaving paw prints in the constantly refreshed snow. Aside from the flood in December before I moved, the two most thrilling events of winter were both times when the dammed up ice broke free and the river, thrilled to have an escape route, pushed the ice dam out of the way and rushed downstream, shoving ice chunks the size of a tractor tire up onto the banks and skittering across yards as it went. The ice cracking was the best part of the winter. Otherwise, my general thought about a move to the river at that time was meh. It's fine. I'm not sorry I did it. But I'm not in ecstasy.

Then spring came. And I was. In ecstasy. And I have been ever since. The Canadian geese, who huddled up somewhere else in the bitterest part of winter began to appear again. A pair who were hanging out in my backyard had two yellow and brown goslings. A nest of bunnies across the street produced a couple of cottontails. A prodigious number of turtles appeared on the banks across the river, looking all drugged by the sunlight, until they caught a glimpse of a kayak floating by. Then, one by one, they'd slip into the water, keeping an eye out for when they could crawl back up into the warm. I recognized the softshell turtles, some the size of a hubcap, and I came to know on which log I'd see the one with the flanged shell. The one who looks like he's wearing a WWI doughboy helmet on his back.

The river's edge filled with swaths of Virginia Bluebells, and the wood's edge with Dutchman's britches. Then, when those had stopped blooming, pale-purple phlox put on a show. The birds, who actually sang all winter long here, broke out into springtime cacophony. Maple seed helicopters covered the ground, and my deck and sparkled as they floated along the river. Spring. Ah.

And now it's summer, or nearly. The heavy sweetness of the Alba rose has replaced the light floral notes of the phlox. White petals taking the place of lilac. The turtles continue to sun on the banks and the logs. Joined now, on the logs at least, by water snakes. I saw a pair making sweet snaky love one time as I paddled past in my kayak. He was shy and slithered off into the water when he finally noticed me. She lolled in the sun unworried.

I haven't put my window air conditioner (no central air here please) in yet. Like most of these river cabins (I mean cottages), mine is two storys on the rear/river side so I leave my second-story windows open at night even when it's a little cool, or a little hot. I'm not ready yet to give up the deep-throated galumphing of the bullfrogs who croon me to sleep or the chirpy, songful racket of the birds who wake me in the morning. I know I'll have to, but not yet.

On the human side of things, I have met few neighbors but Tim who lives south of me has finally walked over to say hello one evening as I was mowing my yard with my reel mower.  It takes 5,969 steps to finish that unmechanized job, according to my iphone Map my Walk app.  Tim said he was waiting to visit because he wasn't sure if I was going to just flip the house or live here. I guess he decided that if I'm willing to mow the yard with a reel mower, I'm a stayer. He's right.

In other neighbor news, Dave the plumber's dog died over the winter. He didn't tell me that but I see the little grave with the cross marker across the road from his house.

And the "summer people" are coming back to their places. That's what I call them, because I am now a "year rounder."

Two of the cabins haven't seen their people at all since I've owned this one. I see the name "McCardle" on the mailbox there. In my mind I've crafted a story behind their absence. In my story, widow or widower McCardle finally passed away a couple years ago. He/she left the vacation cabin on the Flatrock to the children. Those ungrateful McCardle kids aren't interested enough to take time out of their lives in the city somewhere to come down and spend a weekend, and they can't get it together enough to agree to put the place up for sale. So the A-frame with potential, that their parents built as a guest house for the kids, and the old-school 1940s concrete-block cabin beside it, where the McCardles took their morning coffee on deck over the river, sit empty, waiting. A big storm a few weeks ago uprooted two trees on the lot between the cabins. They lie there in the tall grass beside that little stream that runs across the property, down to the river.

Those McCardles don't know what they're missing. I wish I could call them up and tell them that the sycamore trees are dropping their pollen in the lightest of snowy dustings every day now and the day lilies are about to burst into bloom to add their pale orange to the Alba rose white. The woodpeckers are nesting and the bunnies are all grown up now. I saw the goslings tonight and they are almost gray and their tails have suddenly turned white. I've seen a snake cross the river faster than I can swim and there's a shell island just a bit upriver. Best to get down
here to your little cabins soon, McCardles, before the marsh plants grow up and hide all the shells.