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Bird
Sightings
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TURKEY VULTURES
by
Walter Meagher
Death is even-handed. As a result, Turkey Vultures are always with us, food being available all year, from road kills and death in the campo. Living in San Miguel, vultures feed without contention of big cats or hyenas. They glide and sail on dihedral wings, the whisper of air being the power of their engines. Vultures hardly seem to be a bird at all, but a black oriental kite. |
| Yet we dislike them. Their naked red head is unbecoming, and reminds us of its use, feeding within the organs of the carcasses they prize. Yet every adaptation is a marvel, a work of engineering evolved over eons of time. Sibley says the Turkey Vulture finds food by scent. He is such a great authority I must believe him, but John James Audubon conducted an experiment that led him to conclude that the Black Vulture finds food by sight. I want to quote Audubon’s words, the artist naturalist thinking empirically: |
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‘I procured a skin of our common deer … and stuffed it carefully with dried grass … then took it to the middle of an open field, laid it down on its back with the legs up and apart, as if the animal was dead and putrid.’
Audubon hid and waited. Soon enough, a vulture came and jumped on the skin, tore at the glass eyes, tore the stitches apart, but then after much useless effort it took flight. (‘Ornithological Biography’ in John James Audubon: Writings & Drawings. The Library of America, 1999, p. 294.)
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I first saw Turkey Vultures in Mexico in Ciudad Mantes. I was eighteen; everything I saw was a surprise. The bus station was in center city; homes and shops were huddled across the way. I was astonished to see, sitting in a row on the roof of a house opposite the station, a committee of Turkey Vultures. |
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