1623363853 (N) by Nathanael Johnson

Author:Nathanael Johnson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2016-04-14T21:00:00+00:00

TURKEY VULTURE

Josephine, breathless and wild-eyed, found me in the kitchen. “Papa! There’s an eagle!”

“Do you mean a seagull?”

“No, an e-gull!” She pointed outside.

I wiped my hands and followed her to the door. We got there just in time to see a black bird taking off from a tree, powering into the air on wings that might have been longer than my arms. Maybe it was an eagle—a golden eagle, perhaps? Then I saw the scrawny red head. It was a turkey vulture.

I’m generally disappointed when I see turkey vultures. Whenever I see something vaguely raptorlike gliding across the sky, I’ll stop to see if I can identify a hawk or falcon—respectable birds worthy of note. But then I’ll see the fingerlike feathers spread wide at the wingtips or the white on the underside of the wings and think, Oh, just a turkey vulture.

But after a year of researching wildlife so ubiquitous they are invisible, I couldn’t turn away, or tell Josephine that her enthusiasm was misplaced. So what do we know about turkey vultures?

The answer: Not much. Turkey vultures have deflected the attention of scientists just as effectively as they had deflected mine. They are the introverts of the avian world, silently doing important work while more entertaining birds get all the love. This only made them more interesting to me: The more invisible a creature is, the greater its potential to enrich my life. Douglas Long, a biologist and longtime turkey vulture enthusiast, is going to write the first book on these birds as soon as he can get to it. When I asked around, several people told me that Long was the person to talk to about turkey vultures, and I began pestering him with e-mails. Eventually, we got in touch. He told me there are huge gaps in our understanding of turkey vultures. And that’s odd, because they are so big, so readily visible in the sky.

“I think turkey vultures are probably the biggest least-studied birds in North America,” Long told me. “What we know about golden eagles or bald eagles could fill books. No one has written a book on turkey vultures. Not that much is known about them.”

“We have no real idea of what the current population is and what it was historically,” he told me. We don’t know how long they live, though there’s a forty-year-old bird in captivity. “It’s not like you cut off the wing and count the rings.” Though we see the birds all around North and South America, scientists don’t have a handle on their distribution or movements. These very basic facts about this very common bird are simply unknown. Turkey vultures are like an unassuming neighbor that you frequently see, but if you start asking around, you realize no one has ever talked to the guy. And all of a sudden, what had seemed too banal to notice becomes mysterious.

I mistake turkey vultures for hawks or falcons because all these birds are gliding strategists. All raptors are excellent gliders, but turkey vultures have mastered the art.

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