The marvels and benefits of vultures
Other birds trill or trumpet.
Turkey vultures hiss. Their cousins, black vultures, can also grunt like pigs.
Other birds hunt and peck or nail their prey by stealth and dive-bomber derring-do. Vultures feast on the flesh of the dead.
Vultures pee on their own legs to cool them. They ward off intruders by puking on them. With their featherless heads and thick bodies, they are, at best, unlovely.
So, what’s not to love? “Never underestimate a bird without feathers on its head,” said Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Deer Pond Farm Nature Center in Sherman.
That’s because vultures are also highly social, monogamous, good parents and great fliers who can ride thermals for miles.
And they do the world an enormous service. By eating carcasses, they keep the world from accruing great mounds of decaying flesh and all the pathogens those corpses might spread. They are essential workers.
“They really do good for us,” said Bethany Sheffer, volunteer coordinator and naturalist at the Sharon Audubon Center, owned by Audubon Connecticut.
Sharon Audubon has a turkey vulture named Norabo among the injured raptors it cares for. Sheffer said that unlike other birds, turkey vultures need stimulation — kids’ toys, balls, something to capture their attention — lest they get antsy and destructive.
“They have a higher level of intelligence that some other birds,’’ she said.
So far, Norabo has not greeted her with any projectile vomiting.
“We have a better relationship than that,” Sheffer said.
Turkey vultures — so named because they have red heads like male wild turkeys — are the state’s native vulture.
Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said that