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.