High-Flying Vultures

It is a cold morning made colder by a strong wind. Where I am walking - an old railroad embankment now a paved, linear park - the river barely ripples because the trees on either side are blocking the wind from it and me. Only a pair of mallard ducks are on the river, more disturbed by me standing still and looking at them than the people running along the path, with and without dogs.

Turkey vulture, Sandy Hook, NJ, 2018 (RE Berg-Andersson)

There is not much else going on in the wind aside from a brief call by a jay. Then I look up and there is my third turkey vulture of the morning.

I have written about turkey vultures in the past. I've always been impressed by how an ungainly, ugly bird that lives on dead animals looks so graceful and majestic when it flies. Its wide wings are held back, making it look like a giant V in the sky. I heard Pete Dunne describe turkey vultures once as a man walking a tightrope, his arms held up to keep his balance. It is an accurate description.

In a strong wind a turkey vulture wobbles as it fights to stay aloft and in the direction it wants to go. On days like this, turkey vultures are the only birds I expect to see flying. Others, even redtailed hawks, are more likely to stay in the bushes or perched in the low branches of a tree to stay out of the wind.

Why do turkey vultures fly in gusty winds? To eat, naturally. But hawks need to eat, too, and I don't usually see them in gales. I went looking through the internet and found this explanation, which you can believe or not:

One way of looking at the flight behavior of Turkey Vultures, is that they are the one species which flies “with” the wind, while other raptors fly “through” the wind. 

That's one way to look at it, although I've seen plenty of hawks flying "with" rather than "through" the wind. The experts at Cornell's Ornithology Lab note these vultures fly low and slow to smell out carrion, so perhaps the high winds are bringing the smells of breakfast to wherever the big birds roosted for the night, prompting them to take off.

Vultures aloft, Sandy Hook, NJ, December 2019
(RE Berg-Andersson)

Turkey vultures like wide-open spaces, so unless you have a particularly big yard with something dead in it, you are not likely to find them there. (I have never hosted turkey vultures in my yard except one spring, after the snow had melted, when they found a dead, frozen rabbit the day after I did. I made sure they took their snack elsewhere.)

Finding them sunning themselves on your roof on a cold winter morning or roosting in large numbers in your large trees is another matter.  I've seen many such vulture roosts, some in my neighborhood. As you would expect, most people don't want these reminders of death hanging around their roofs or trees because, as with all creatures, what goes in one orifice eventually comes out another, and 70 pooping vultures can make quite a mess.

Better to watch them aloft in the wind, doing what they must to survive.