Vultures!
Heartwood Master Naturalist, Ken Kramm, spoke at the January meeting of the Indigo Lake Estates garden club on those often maligned but absolutely essential birds, vultures. While often associated with death, vultures are nature’s clean-up crew. Without them we would be buried in dead animals.
Vultures are not buzzards. Buzzards are birds of prey, native to Europe, which can soar, much like a vulture. When early European settlers came to the Americas they saw vultures circling overhead and assumed they were buzzards. The name stuck and we have been erroneously calling them buzzards ever since. There are two types of vultures in Texas, the black vulture and the red-headed turkey vulture. They are perfectly adapted to their lifestyle. Their bald heads are easily cleaned of the gore that gets stuck there when they delve into their dinner. Their keen vision and five to six foot wingspan let them soar over large areas, searching for food. In addition the turkey vulture has a great sense of smell, something unusual in birds. It can smell road kill a mile away. Black vultures don’t have that ability but they know to follow the turkey vultures to find a meal.
The vulture’s unique digestive system kills any harmful bacteria that might be present in the carcasses they eat. Ken described their droppings as being like hand sanitizer. Vultures poop on their own legs to rid themselves of any bacteria they might have picked up. In countries where vultures have become scarce there is often an uptick in diseases carried by wildlife such as rabies and distemper. If a vulture eats an infected animal it takes the disease bacteria out of the ecosystem. That isn’t the case if it is eaten by some other scavenger.
So the next time you see a vulture overhead, be happy. It’s doing the job nobody else wants to do and doing it very well.
Written by Susan Beckemeier