If you have gone looking for the arrival of a migratory raptor on a clear day for bird watching, your heart may have leaped at the sight of a large bird in the distance with wings stretched out in a dihedral V-shape, soaring in wide wobbly circles – more than likely it would be a turkey vulture.
They’re a common sight around Buzzards Bay and, perhaps, a seasonal solar sun sign as they are among the first aerial harbingers of winter’s end at last!
With ten times the eyesight of humans and an even stronger sense of smell, turkey vultures are able to locate from a mile or more away a free meal preserved in ice all this time and now liberated to be found behind a receding frost line.
Turkey vultures are well adapted to a life of propitious scavenging with heads and necks featherless to prevent parasites attaching from their carrion diet or accumulating on their bodies where powerful enzymes and acids in their stomachs make them immune to disease of decaying food.
This remarkable looking creature is classified as a New World American vulture, and our largest of all diurnal raptors. The turkey vulture is also one of the oldest species, documented by counting back through limestone strata pages of time and finding their fossils 50 million years old.
Today, the bird watching organization Partners In Flight estimates the turkey vulture post-pesticide increased population at 18 million, not endangered, with about 30 percent of them spending time in the U.S. and some wintering in Mexico.
They are also labeled as extremely gregarious, congregating over an abundance of food such as at a pig farm, as well as roosting after a big meal in numbers of up to one hundred or more individuals.
When mating, they perform an aerial “following” performance where one mate whirls and dives after the other in a spectacular display of aerial acrobatics, proving you may find them interesting by careful observation of their behavior and habits.
Elaborating on the Native American belief that all living creatures on Earth are sacred – even the smallest blade of grass – I have now done my level best to persuade you as a reader that even though the turkey vulture may be best known as Mother Nature’s sanitation department with its featherless visage of a face that would stop a clock, they are beneficial to the point of being ‘not so unclean.’
Thank you for sharing in my interest in environmental awareness.
By George B. Emmons