American River Wildlife News
Vilified vulture has its virtues
They eat rotting things, God-awful smelly things. They're bald, red-faced and ugly.
Get too close to one -- as if you would ever want to -- and it might fend you off by upchucking all over you. In the summer, they keep cool by urinating on their spindly legs.
They are rarely studied because they are not endangered, despite human encroachment. For them, urban sprawl means more road kill -- a.k.a. lunch.
They don't sing, they hiss. Their plumage is boring.
In short, the turkey vulture suffers from an image problem. The eagle was put on the quarter and the seal of the United States. The owl is revered for its wisdom, the hawk its ferocity. The turkey vulture is all but ignored.
Yet, this bird, readily visible this time of year in the Sacramento skies, may be the most magnificent flyer in all of North America, with its 6-foot V-shaped wingspan and its genius for soaring.
It can ride thermal air currents for hours at a time without ever flapping its wings. A turkey vulture can smell a meal from 1,000 feet or more overhead.
"Vultures have a fairly small coterie of aficionados," says John Trochet, a Sacramento bird expert and naturalist. "Their feeding habits disgust a lot of people."
"Sometimes an animal is so common that people just take it for granted or dismiss it," says Bill Lynch, a wildlife biologist and president of the Turkey Vulture Society, a volunteer advocacy group started in 1994 to promote the underappreciated bird. "There are several things I think are really neat about them."
For one, the bird has powerful enzymes in its digestion system that render even the most putrid carrion sterile, Lynch says.
"They are amazingly free of disease," says Trochet. "They seem to be extremely resistant to botulism and salmonella."
The turkey vulture's ability to locate and devour rotting animal flesh is considered an unseemly but crucial role in the wild, a key link in the circle of life. They feed on everything from mice to deer.
More at The Sacramento Bee.