The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
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 in the latter part of the 19th century, turkey vultures all but disappeared from the state. Because Connecticut was 90 percent fields and pastures, and almost no woods, there were no deer and therefore, no deer carcasses to feed on.
“Farmers were pretty good at disposing of their own dead animals,” Comins said. They also killed vultures out of a belief they were pests, or omens of bad luck.
In the 20th century, as farming declined, the forests grew back in abandoned fields. Turkey vultures returned, nesting here again here in the 1930s and 1940s and becoming a common sight in the 1960 and 1970s.
Black vultures — which stick to basic black heads — had been a southern species. Comins said there were no reports on black vultures in the Connecticut Bird Atlas that surveyed nesting birds in the state from 1982 to 1986.
But they started showing up as occasional visitors in the 1990s. Now, there are thousands of them.
“I saw one from my office window at Milford Point,” Comins said. “You can pretty much see them everywhere in the state.”
Angela Dimmitt, of New Milford, president of the Western Connecticut Bird Club, said she’s seen large numbers of black vultures roosting in the vicinity of Sunny Valley Preserve in New Milford.
“I’ve seen as many as 100,” she said.
Vultures are marvels of evolution. They don’t have
feathers on their heads, so that as they tear apart a carcass, there are no feathers to get laden with bacteria. They
have strong bills, the better to rip through tough hide into flesh. They also have extremely acidic stomach juices that kill off the bacteria in a meal of rotting flesh.
Along with their differently-colored heads, turkey vultures and black vultures have different wing colorations and flight patterns.
Turkey vultures show a lot of white on the undersides of their dark wings as they fly. Black vultures have only white wing tips.
Turkey vultures have a distinct V-shaped look when they fly, teeter-tottering in the sky to adjust to the slightest change in wind currents. Black vultures fly with straighter wings which they mix with rapid wing beats.
Rare among birds, turkey
vultures have an acute sense of smell. They can smell what newly-slain roadkill is out there, they swoop in for some carrion carry-out.
Black vultures lack that sense of smell. So they have been known to fly above turkey vultures, watch them, follow them down to a meal and then aggressively drive them away.
Deer Pond Farm’s Hagadorn said that people should marvel at vultures’ wonderful ability to fly above us, and also be thankful and the clean-up work they do when they get down to earth. Beauty is as beauty does.
“Imagine a world without scavengers,” she said.