by Richard Seifried
Hazy morning. Temperature 60°. Weak, thin cumulus clouds obscure all but tiny peepholes of blue sky. Those, too, are a pale, timid blue.
Not much stirring this morning. A blue jay attempted to feed on our suet block but the dogs and my entering the enclosed back porch frightened him away. Impatient, unlike the other species, the raucous jay will seek other sources of food and check back later in the day. “To heck with those guys!”
Soon the day will become hot, muggy. Large storms are slowly moving out of Oklahoma and will possibly hit us this afternoon. On such mornings, goldfinches, nuthatches, and woodpeckers are feeding in the deep forest, so there really aren’t many feathered creatures about. Not even crows.
On such days as this one, if you can find an open lawn or meadow where you are able to look way up, halfway to the clouds, you may discern a tiny black dot with wings, circling on the early morning thermals. If you do see such a creature, it is likely that you are observing a turkey vulture, a buzzard.
Of all our feathered brothers, buzzards are probably considered to be the most offensive of all. They survive on carrion, gorging their craws with stinking, rotten, slimy meat of road kills, remains of slain prey, and the corpses of creatures that have succumbed to heat, heart failure, internal parasites, or tick infestations.
Not a very pleasant topic to begin a musing with, you say. Well, let me defend one of our favorite Signal Hill inhabitants.
Nearly every day, we watch the great vultures circling above the forested hills. Often they come sailing past just a ways out from our hilltop residence. They are beautiful to behold, at a distance.
Long wings, soaring, catching slight updrafts, seldom flapping, vultures are the most graceful of our feathered friends.
Most common is the turkey vulture. It is called that because of its ugly, naked, red head. When spread on a sunny day, the underside of the rear wing feathers flashes a nearly silver display. Again, its gracefulness is beyond compare.
The year that I was a dishwasher and dryer at a YMCA camp in Piqua enabled me to get a very close look at an immature turkey vulture.
Often, after noon dishes were “done,” I’d slip away, hike down an abandoned Miami-Erie Canal towpath, cross a dirt road, and soon arrive at my private sanctuary. A tiny stream flowed toward the Great Miami River. Because of the creek, a stone aqueduct had been built so that the canal boats could cross over the little stream’s valley.
By that year, 1944, the canal was long gone and the aqueduct was disintegrating, rock by falling rock, a rather dangerous place to be.
It was cool inside the arch, sort of musty, inhabited only by crawdads and a few minnows. I would sit on a large, flat rock and read my books, away from radios, children yelling, and the other rather screwy teenagers, like myself.
On one particular day, I drifted out onto a meadow and there, badly frightened, sat an immature buzzard.
Quite excited, thinking I had found a good pet, I picked it up and ran all the way back to camp. We lived in a bunkhouse, we staff members, so I took my new friend inside and turned him loose. Badly frightened, the buzzard clacked its way across the wooden floor, turned and faced its adversaries, us. Someone got it a shallow pan of water.
About then Bill Bumguard, Camp Director, came storming into the room. He was shouting, very distraught. “Get that stinking thing out of here!”
He was wrong. The buzzard didn’t smell badly at all.
“Get it out! Now! It will smell up the whole place!”
Bill was a city person.
His yelling did it. My poor “pet” couldn’t stand the pressure. He or she opened its big beak and out came an impressive amount of milky bile.
Kids jumped to clean up the mess. Bill stomped out of the bunkhouse, and I took the poor creature back to the meadow.
Vultures, buzzards, are our garbage collectors, our cleaner-uppers of forests, roads, and fields. Of all our feathered friends, they are probably the most beneficial.
Turkey vultures are large, body twenty-five inches long with a wingspan of seventy-two inches. Some scientists claim that they can smell their favorite foods as much as twenty miles from where they lay, rotting. When one spirals down, others, out of our sight range, come in and soon three, a dozen, even more will be circling over the kill spot.
That species, Catha’rtes a’ura (I knew that you would want to know that), has a geographical range that encompasses the entire United States, plus Mexico and parts of western Canada.
Its relative, Co’ragyps atra’tus, the black vulture, has a range that includes Northern Mexico and southern United States, mostly in the east. It sports a gray head and white under-winged feathers, the average size being twenty-two inches long with a wingspan of fifty-four inches.
Black vultures aren’t nearly as graceful as the turkey vulture. If black vultures are around, then their cousins, the turkey vultures, disappear. I have the unsubstantiated belief, from a source requesting anonymity, that black vultures are sort of mean. They seem to sometimes kill a dying or weak animal.
Once, our yorkie, Gypsy Rose, was walking very slowly (it was a hot day) and two vultures came in low, checking her out. I think that they were of the black variety.
Some Indian tribes attribute certain powers to vultures.
Just a few winters ago, Jean and I were working at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona. Right to the east of the monument was the large Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. (Note: The tribe is called “Papago” by their former enemy tribes and some stupid Whites. The word means “Bean Eaters.” For some not-so-mysterious reason, they don’t like being called that.)
Toward the end of winter, the Tohono O’odham held a pow-wow on the monument. It was quite an event. I even saw some Blackfeet from Montana there.
That day I had a noon assignment at the Visitor Center. Two law enforcement officers came to me and said that the one dancer had lost or forgotten his or her rattle. Since I possessed one, could they use it? I gave them permission to get in our unlocked RV and retrieve the object.
The rangers took the wrong one. The rattle presented to the dancers, our Native neighbors, was made out of an unusual shaped small branch, a stiff, black stomach pouch filled with seeds, and beautiful black feathers. When held just right, it didn’t take much imagination to see the ugly head, crooked neck, and the black-feathered body of a vulture.
The Native women went berserk. They refused to touch it. When I finally arrived with the correct rattle, they told me to take the vulture rattle away. It, they said, was a death rattle and they wanted nothing to do with it.
Up until now, what I have written is interesting but nothing else. But now, I will get a little bit spooky.
As I walked toward the dance circle, I looked up into the cloudless sky and observed a long line of vultures, not very high off the ground, coming in one after the other in a perfect line, sailing over me.
Realizing that the Native women were watching and really not knowing why I did it, I stopped, looked up at the line of vultures, lifted the rattle, and with both hands shook it as hard as I could. Then I lowered it. Raised it again and shook the vulture rattle. Three times I did that.
Then, really acting now, I proceeded on my way, ignoring the birds above me. Not a minute later, out of sight of the women, I looked up again.
The vultures were gone!
I recall thinking, “Boy! They’ll talk about that for a long time.”
What do I think? I just tell them; I don’t explain them!
Turkey vulture soaring over Blackwater Canyon in West Virginia
