Published: October 28, 2006 01:06 pm      

Sterling Scavengers

A few things about vultures you may not know

What can I tell you about vultures that you don’t already know? Not much, but I can treat you to a nifty poem about these sterling scavengers.

You may know that vultures regularly urinate on their legs, leaving a sort of whitewash. One theory is this acts as a cooling mechanism as the urine evaporates and lowers the temperature. (Don’t try this at home, the temporary cooling is not worth the wrath of your wife.) Another theory holds that the urine acts as a germ-killer to help prevent infections. (Bactine will do just as well.) What you may not know that this leg wetting makes it hard to keep up with the migratory habits of vultures. It seems the urine becomes caked on aluminum bands and can hobble and incapacitate a bird — so leg bands are prohibited on turkey vultures in the U.S. and Canada. This makes it difficult to track their migration patterns. (Black vultures are largely non-migratory, occupying the same territory year-round.)

However, color wing tags and satellite tracking are increasingly being used to monitor the birds. It’s been discovered that each autumn, numerous turkey vultures begin their southbound journeys across southern Canada and the northern United States, with peak movements in late September and October. Biggest concentration comes at a major migration bottleneck along the Gulf Coast of southern Veracruz, Mexico, where some two or three million vultures pass by.

Vultures over-winter as far south as Central and South America, but also in Florida and even Maryland and New Jersey.

And, of course you know that the two vultures in our area are the black vulture and the turkey vulture. In addition to soaring on warm thermals, the birds utilize high towers and utility poles to scan for carrion. The turkey vulture, with nostrils that are larger and internally more complex than those of the black vulture, also utilizes smell to find its food. (In Africa, some of the vultures are of a more robust nature. The lappet-faced variety prefers hides and sinews to flesh and the bearded vulture actually prefers bones to any other part – he flies high and drops them on bare rocks to get at the marrow.)

So let us conclude with an excellent vulture poem by Beverly Galante of Wimberley:



Ode to the

Maintenance Engineer

What’s that in the road, you say.

Gosh, I hope they get out of the way.

Strange little heads on bodies so big,

Black as ravens, appetite of a pig.

A congregation, the meeting place,

To the side of the road they fly with grace.

Reluctant to leave the meal they found,

They jump and scoot to safer ground.

But back they go when all is clear,

To feast on raccoon, dillo and deer.

A vulture’s not pretty, I confess,

But someone has to clean up the mess.