Free vulture buffet

 

All that’s missing is a sign: "Free vulture buffet. Line forms here."

The "buffet" is a small-ish dead groundhog, newly dead. Notice the vultures include both turkey vultures and a few black vultures. Driving by, a few of the turkey vultures hopped away. Not the black vultures. My impression is that they are more aggressive around dinner or at least less likely to be intimidated by something so mundane as a car.

Both vultures practice vulturing



Black vulture (bottom) and turkey vulture (top)

 The air was so thick and heavy yesterday that even the vultures were brought to ground. Instead, both black and turkey vultures hung out around Roundtop’s dumpsters. Perhaps they figured that since they were grounded, they might as well hang out where they could still find some pickings. Or hoped to.


The black vultures seem less shy and slower to leave a food source than are the turkey vultures. The turkey vultures hopped over to the roof of the nearby maintenance building as soon as I pulled up to their dumpsters. The black vultures didn’t budge when I got out of the car and closed the door and only deigned to move when I got within several feet of them.



Black vulture



Black vultures are supposed to be a bit smaller than turkey vultures, but I can’t say that I notice that. They are much the same size as far as I can see. Lots of vultures ply the air around Roundtop, both kinds. They roost on or near the mountain on most nights. Once 20 of them roosted atop my cabin roof and the old TV antenna. I live only about 20 miles from Gettysburg, site of the famous battle, of course. There, witnesses told of masses of vultures for months after the battle, and to this day the battlefield boasts many, many vultures. Once the big birds found that spot, they didn’t want to leave, apparently. At this point, 150 years after the battle, I do have to wonder what keeps so many of them there. Perhaps that congregation of them contributes to the large numbers I have at Roundtop.



Changes in a new year

Even though 2010 is just 20 days old, it’s already proving to be different from its predecessor in at least one thing. I am regularly seeing black vultures plying the skies around Roundtop.

Black vultures, as you may know, are really a southern vulture. Until perhaps 20 years ago, I’d never seen one in Pennsylvania. For the past 10 years, they’ve been rather common around here during migration and in summer. But not in winter. I could hope to find one on the first warm, sunny day starting around mid-February, but anything before then was out of the question.

This year, I have already seen 10, spaced one or two at a time on different days, often with 3-4 turkey vultures. Several are likely the same birds. This morning I saw one on the drive to work, in roughly the same area where I saw one late last week. On Monday, I saw two near Pinchot State Park with what was probably the same group of Turkey Vultures that I saw the week before.

Still, in previous years finding black vultures on January 1, no matter if that day was a warm and sunny one, simply wasn’t going to happen. This year, finding the birds in January wasn’t a fluke. I’m seeing them regularly.

And perhaps even this wouldn’t feel so unusual to me if January 2010 had turned out to be unseasonably warm. Oh, the past few days have been unseasonably warm, but the vultures were also seen on days when it was anything but warm. Even more interesting, the three to four weeks leading up to now were unseasonably cold, and I still saw black vultures.

It makes me wonder what will happen in the next 20 years. Will black vultures become the dominant local vulture? Will turkey vultures become the minority? All this drama, and the year is just 20 days old.

Dumpster Diver

The Black Vultures are dumpster diving again. Maybe he or she was hoping that fan was still in the box, though it hasn't been that hot and how the bird was planning to plug it in, I have no idea. Oddly, the Turkey Vultures rarely dumpster dive, and I'm starting to wonder if the propensity for diving is a true behavioral distinction between the two species. I can almost see the field guides now. "If the bird is found in a dumpster, it's almost certainly a black vulture, as turkey vultures prefer to scavenge for carcasses along roads."

It's been a slow day here at Roundtop. I guess you could tell that, huh?

This is My Dumpster!

First, let me say that I’ve always preferred the black vulture to the turkey vulture. I think my bias is simply based on how they fly. To me, turkey vultures always look as though they are about to fall out of the sky, rocking back and forth like a kid trying to walk on a fence. Black vultures know how to fly.

The first time I remember seeing one in Pennsylvania was on Hawk Mountain, perhaps 20 years ago. As I recall, it was a slow day, early in the fall season and hawks were in short supply. So, as is common at such times, rather than scanning an empty sky, I was talking to someone, probably catching up on what we’d both been up to since we last saw each other. I remember someone yelled "immature bald eagle"—a conversation stopper if ever there is one. I turned and started scanning the sky, looking past the vultures overheard and not seeing anything that resembled an eagle when the counter calmly told the person who was pointing frantically at a large bird overhead, "that’s a black vulture."

And then I realized that the black vulture overhead did, sort of, fly a bit like an eagle. At least, it didn’t fly at all like a turkey vulture that holds its wings in a characteristic v-shape. By comparison, the black vulture holds its wings flat, like an eagle. The person who’d called "eagle" and who had never seen a black vulture before made the ID based on the flat wings and the bird’s color, figuring that since the bird obviously wasn’t a turkey vulture, it obviously had to be an eagle.

Since then, the ever-warming climate has made the black vulture a fairly common visitor to my area. They are still no where as common as the turkey vulture, but their numbers increase. If I had to guess, I’d say I see a pair of black vultures for perhaps every 30 turkey vultures I see.
Black vultures are different from turkey vultures in a couple of interesting ways other than just in the color of their heads. They are slightly smaller and are considered to be "more social." I would say that if you see one black vulture there is almost certainly a second or even more. Whether these are paired birds or pairs with young, I don’t know. But two together are almost always a given.

Another interesting difference is that while turkey vultures find their dinners based primarily on smell, black vultures, perhaps including the one in today’s photo, find their dinners primarily by eyesight. Further south, where black vultures are more numerous, their social nature could also be termed "pushy," as they have been known to force turkey vultures away from a meal simply by their overwhelming numbers.

Our new world vultures are quite a bit different from their old world cousins. There, vultures are more raptor-like and have raptor-like feet and beaks. Our vultures have chicken-like feet, more adapted to running than tearing dinner apart.