If you drive around the Blackstone Valley frequently, you have undoubtedly seen large black birds soaring overhead. Not hawks, not ravines or crows. Turkey vultures!
They could easily be mistaken for roosting wild turkeys as they are a like size and demeanor. I saw one perched in a tree at the side of Route 102 in Burrillville a week ago. However, up close, there is no mistaking turkey vultures for another species. They are one ugly bird!
Poor things. They are like an unfinished project…lustrous dark brown feathers all around except the head which is bare, red and raw looking. There is nothing remotely attractive about it. However, the bird does serve a purpose. Turkey vultures eat carrion, often pushing the head inside a body cavity to reach a tender morsel. A feathered head would collect meat and bacteria whereas the bald dome is more hygienic. But understanding the logic of the bird’s design does not make it more attractive.
Turkeys have bald heads, complete with wattles. Somehow they do not look unfinished, unattractive or menacing as do turkey vultures. Maybe the menace comes from size…a turkey vulture has a six-foot wingspan and its body measures 25 to 32 inches long. The typical adult bird weighs between 3.5 and 5 pounds.
Turkey vultures, Cathartes aura, are predators that soar above the landscape searching for food. Although they eat meat, they don’t need to kill it, unlike other predators like mountain lions and fisher cats. They are opportunistic feeders. While their keen eyesight is used to find food as they fly overhead, they possess an acute sense of smell that leads them to carrion. Turkey vultures are one of only a few birds of prey that use smell to locate food. While their preference for road kill is well known, they also feed on mussels, grasshoppers, mayflies, rotten pumpkins, grapes, juniper berries and several other food groups I decline to mention here in the event you are reading this with your morning coffee.
While the vultures have great olfactory senses, they have little voice capability. Actually, the birds do not have a voice box and communicate in a series of hisses, usually when alarmed, and grunts between family members. They are also prone to vomit if stressed by a predator, researcher, or avid photographer.
One can find turkey vultures across the continental United States and south into Central America. Interestingly, climate change and development has extended its hunting ground: they do not care for really cold climates; and additional traffic means more road kills and feeding opportunities.
The vulture makes its home in hollows and little caves, like the spaces under bushes or in hollow stumps. They reproduce laying 2 eggs that the female tends for about 40 days. Once hatched, the chicks are fed regurgitated food not morsels of meat. Fledglings leave the nest in 10 weeks.
There is a particularly interesting fact regarding vultures. Biologists used to believe that all vultures were raptors of the family Falconiformes. In the early 1990s, it was proven that the vultures in the western hemisphere were actually evolved from a different ancestral specie than those in the eastern hemisphere. The similar features of the birds from each hemisphere did not come from them sharing a common ancestor but rather from developing similar features completely independently from one another, a process called convergent evolution. So the turkey vulture is a cool specie.
When seen flying overhead, turkey vultures are beautiful. One cannot see their ugly heads. They are very elegant and graceful in flight. One can often see them soaring for long periods of time without flapping their huge wings.
Graceful, cool…but ugly!