But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering
away in the sea-light over the precipice.
– Robinson Jeffers, “Vulture”
The flight of a vulture is a beautiful thing.
It is effortless, almost completely unreliant on the tension and labor of flapping—to say nothing of the clamorous combustion we rely on to lift our heavy engines. To fly as a turkey vulture flies is to glide and to sail. You wait for the sun’s heat to stir the night’s cool air into motion, and then you simply raise your wings, spread wide your hands, and feel the invisible atmospheric matter lift you upwards like a wave of wind-swept pollen. You ascend into the sea-light, that upper sea of massless color, to travel endless miles with no more effort than an occasional shift in pose to keep you in the center of those currents, those rising swells of air that form with the warming sunlight, that flow upward from the ridges, or that stream by in the great intercontinental pathways.
There are no other creatures of the land to whom miles mean so little. For them, the earth has no obstacles. A vulture looks out, mountains and deserts lying before her, and feels no hesitation, no sense of daunting distance. She rises, sets her sails, and the long hours of a summer day exist only to be filled with that steady, silent passage.
Of course, you might object that this placid soaring is but one fragment of their existence, and much of even that time is mentally occupied by a less pleasant object—the constant search for the tangy, incipient odor of dead flesh. This seems like a distinctly unpleasant preoccupation to our senses, and one that becomes increasingly distasteful as we imagine the sequel: the detection, the approach, the furtive tearing apart of corpses, and the hurried ingestion before disturbance by raptor, coyote, or car.
But what do we know of a turkey vulture’s senses? Obviously, their attraction to those dead bodies is not tolerance of something unpleasant, as it would be for us—it is the gratification of the searched-for object. That fundamental taste for cadavers on the verge of decomposition is not wrong and unnatural: it is the indication of their greater capacity for purification. We abhor the thought because their food would kill us, with our sensitive stomachs and fragile constitutions. Our senses are biased, but we at least have the capacity to intellectually understand this, to set aside instinctive repugnance for mental appreciation. Because mentally, rationally, and—in the great algebraic logic of the world—aesthetically, the feeding of vultures is also a beautiful thing.
We glorify recycling, often beyond its ecological merits (commercial recycling is a highly partial recovery of energy predicated on a system of disposable wastefulness). Vultures are the foremost actors in the all-encompassing circle of nature’s recycling. There are countless small creatures who fill out the cast of this story, and they should be appreciated and celebrated. But no other animal approaches our vulture’s effectiveness at finding the world’s deceased and redistributing their matter, returning their cold carbon to the great reservoirs of life-to-be.
“Turkey vulture” is an unfortunately commonplace and dismissive name. Cathartes aura is the more impressive title given by science: the wind-borne purifier. Once the original energy of the sun has been changed from plant to animal, any being is suitable material for the vulture’s cathartic conversion: insect or fish, mammal or man. They don’t work on the small, slow scale of maggots and microbes. Vultures come from the sky, sense their opportunities and obligations from impossible distances. They scent the call upon the wind and instantly assemble. And within a day’s short span they return the dead to life.
The Beautiful Function of Effortless Flight
If you want to make the simplest case for vulturine beauty, their flight abilities alone form a fully sufficient response, as Jeffers suggests. Even the judgmental old populizers admit this; when placing the swallow-tailed kite at the peak of all the beautiful fliers of the world, Neltje Blanchan goes out of her way to place it above the three credible contenders: swallows, terns, and turkey vultures. She elaborates:
Floating high in air, with never a perceptible movement of its widespread wings, as it circles with majestic, unimpassioned grace in a great spiral, this common buzzard of our southern states suggests by its flight the very poetry of motion, while its terrestrial habits of scavenger are surely the very prose of existence.
– Birds that Hunt and are Hunted, 1898
Modern connoisseur of flight Pete Dunne describes the ballet in step-by-step precision, going beyond the basics (largely unflapping flight, wings held in a strong “dihedral,” or v-shape) to cover the minutiae in loving detail. Minutiae such as their unaquiline rocking, the silver in their underwings, and their inimitable “wing flex”:
Flight is tipsy and unsteady, as if the bird were walking an invisible rail fence in the sky, trying to maintain its balance.
At every tip up, the underwings flash silver, like a mirror catching the sun. The effect is dramatic, visible at great distances and virtually diagnostic.
A Turkey Vulture also has the curious habit of waving its hands (i.e. drooping its wingtips, then straightening them out) in a sort of mock flap. The bird’s arms remain rigid and uplifted. The hands simply wilt, then right themselves.
And the scientists substantiate the superlative quality of their capabilities, their fittedness to their ecological strategy, and their ability to use the wind without expenditure of energy:
Vultures… find food by soaring, which has nearly the same metabolic cost as perching—it’s the equivalent of perching in the sky.
– Life Everlasting, Bernd Heinrich
Cathartes aura… are vastly superior to the other raptors in slope soaring.
– Neal Griffith Smith, Dynamics of the Transisthmian Migration of Raptors Between Central and South America, 1985
In environments with limited topography where orographic updrafts are minimal or nonexistent, shear-induced turbulence provides an alternative source of atmospheric energy available to soaring birds. [In other words, in the absence of lift from thermal currents or topographical features, vultures can still extract lift from small-scale turbulence using their unique proficiency at “contorted soaring,” their famous wobbling, tippy flight style that constantly adjusts wing angle.]
– Julie M. Mallon, Keith L. Bildstein, and Todd E. Katzner, In-flight turbulence benefits soaring birds, 2016
This efficiency and skill at turning natural air movements to their advantage is one of the keys to vultures’ preeminence in the world of scavengers, giving them access to a far greater amount of geographical space than mammal or invertebrate competitors. A vulture might cover a hundred miles in a single feeding trip. In physical terms, this is enabled by their large wing area relative to their body size: turkey vultures have a substantial six foot wingspan, almost as large as that of eagles, while weighing in at just over four pounds, a third to a half of the weight of those famous predators. And for a rough but illustrative parallel, compare this to human mass: you might weigh some 40 times as much as a vulture—perhaps you too could fly if your wings were of similar proportion, say 14 times as wide and 3 times as deep, for an 85 ft. in wingspan with 3 ft. flight feathers. With wings like that, you could imagine raising your arms and feeling yourself wafted upwards by the swelling current.
In the history of flying scavengers, turkey vultures are not exceptional for their size; in truth, they are the modest descendants we have inherited in our shrunken modern world. We live on a continent that has lost its vast herds of native ungulates to the Europeans (herds which fed the formerly widespread “California” condor with its 10 ft. wingspan), its preceding megafauna to climate change and the earlier-arriving humans (mammoths and giant sloths and so on which fed the teratorns with their 15–20 ft. wingspans), and its dinosaurs to a meteor (which fed the pterosaurs with their 30+ ft. wingspans). The larger the carrion, the larger and farther-roaming the scavengers.
But the turkey vulture is the survivor, and still boasts a wider wingspan than I possess, sufficient to bear her up and up when she feels the warm air rising. She sees our hills and mountains as springs of energy, as ramps upon which roll the invisible waves that lift her up, launch her from the earth again and again. And even when the air is cool and the land is flat, when hawks and eagles resort to laborious pumping of their heavy wings, the red-headed vulture tilts and teeters, balancing on a knife’s edge, leaning on each wing in a constant alternation to tease out every sky-breath wrinkle and turn it into flight.
The Wonderful “Unbeautiful” Functions
Viewers at a distance who simply dismiss details or ecologically-minded generalizers will often find it in themselves to admit a certain grace and admiration for at least this flying talent, while still maintaining an undiminished distaste for many of the vultures’ other qualities. But if the well-adapted functionality of the flight is a key part of our admiration, then the same rule should apply to their other talents as well. Functional perfection is intrinsic to beauty. And so the wonders of the vulture do not cease when they come to earth.
What kind of distasteful excellencies am I alluding to? Let me champion three of the turkey vulture’s progressively more wonderful adaptations: baldheadedness, projectile vomiting, and the unique and arcane ability known as urohidrosis. I am not the first to do so:
Baldheadedness: We call them turkey vultures and in parts of South America they call them aura cabecirrojo and similar variations in recognition of their distinctively unfeathered heads, red in adults and gray in immature birds. This lack of feathers has a pretty clear evolutionary function, aptly summed up by Mosco above: it makes head hygiene easier than it would be if the head was feathered. Normal birds would get all kinds of old bits of bacteria-laden meat stuck under their feathers, like huge-bearded mountain men with crumbs in their greasy whiskers, except more so. This is a sanitary measure.
And we blame them for that! We, the hairless ape that prides itself on all its modern washing technologies! In some respects this is the most sanitation-minded of all creatures, the one who works with the most dangerous food and has had to work out ways of keeping herself safe without all of our paraphernalia of masks and gloves, body-substance isolation devices, soap and water and alcohol cleansers.
And as for the redness it reveals—aren’t we the ones who love the red birds, the cardinals and tanagers and finches? Aren’t we the ones who in our fascination with the exotic invent bare-skinned humanoids of such diverse tints and saturations? We love weird-colored skin!
On what basis then do we find this modest, placid, even wistful countenance deserving of rejection and disdain?
Vomit: Vultures are clumsy, mild-mannered, inoffensive types. They lack most of the adaptations to cruelty and simple power that the hawks possess. Even within the world of scavengers, turkey vultures are not particularly high on the totem pole: they get pushed aside by black vultures and condors where their ranges overlap, as well as by eagles, caracaras, wolves, coyotes, and pretty much anyone larger than a raven. When prey partitioning within scavenging communities is analyzed, the general trend across the turkey vulture’s enormous range is that they get the smaller creatures—they are the ones with the talents to find food, and if it’s small enough, they get to eat it themselves. If it’s too big to allow immediate consumption, they will soon get pushed aside by the myriad creatures who base their carrion-finding strategy around “watch the turkey vultures, bully them aside.”
What tools has nature armed them with for defense? In the utmost extremities of threat, as when a dangerous predator approaches their young in the nest, what can they do? The adults can play dead (but eagles have still been known to eat them—unfortunately some other birds are ok with eating dead things). The babies can mock-charge (but if the aggressor doesn’t flee, the only remaining recourse is to turn around and panic). But both young and old have been granted one shared weapon emblematic of the species: projectile vomiting! Or as the scientists describe it with slightly less glee, they can produce
a foul-smelling regurgitate thought to repel would-be predators.
We call it gross. But, please, it’s all they have! They can’t fight or kill. All they can do is spit up some smelly stuff, odorous with those pungent bacteria of slightly putrid meat that signify “not food” to mammals. (Their unique sharing of the olfactory language of mammals is why playing dead doesn’t work well with eagles, who don’t know about smelling.) Far from being baleful omens of death, they are among the mildest of creatures. Think of skunks, forceless and innocent creatures dubbed with benign names like “Flower” when cast in cartoons. Vultures are of the same fraternity: meek and clumsy creatures with odor their only defense.
Urohidrosis: The turkey vulture has a huge range, from southern Canada through the essential entirety of South America. (It seems to be expanding northward with climate change.) They live in humid jungles, dry deserts, and everything in between. Humans adapt to varied climates with varied clothing and shelters. Most other animals don’t have such optional, location-flexible means of controlling their temperature depending on where they live, thereby limiting their home range to places of amenable climate.
But turkey vultures can live in several radically different climates, while being fundamentally the same birds in terms of size and plumage and so on, because they can control their temperature through behavior. They can pant (like many animals), they can hold out their huge dark wings to take in heat (like cormorants), but they can also do something else that no other American bird can do, something that can quickly lower their overall body temperature by several degrees, on demand. What is this superpower?
This seems the only reasonable attitude for one announcing this talent, complete with gleeful eye blink. And for an outside admirer, the only appropriate attitude is a parallel enormous fondness, to marvel at that amazing resourcefulness, that strategy that those uncreative, weakly-endowed other birds wouldn’t even think of doing when it’s hot out. We humans weren’t even clever enough to come up with a word for urohidrosis until the 1960s, while the vultures have been actually practicing the feat for untold millenia. What could I say to a vulture sedately cooling itself in a hundred-degree desert, were I to witness their superior adaptability, scarcely matched by me with all my apparatus of hats and sunscreen and water bottles? My instinctive reaction and outer bound of my admiration could only be expressed with a wondering smile and soft crooning of Gershwin:
’S won-der-ful, ’s mar-ve-lous…
(How you cool off… your legs!)
The Life After Death
Let us permit the ever-serious Jeffers to continue:
… To be eaten
by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment;
What a life after death.
Flight is the red-headed vulture’s most obvious beauty. And those easily-snubbed adaptations of baldheadedness, vomitory defense, and urohidrosis have their own special appeal. But in the end, these are instrumental or peripheral talents. They are details that ultimately contribute to one underlying purpose, the function which when fully absorbed constitutes both the vultures’ highest talent and their fundamental service: they are the great undertakers of the Americas, the disposers of the dead. Though “undertaker” is of course a misnomer of grave-digging humans—vultures do not take things under, but raise them up in Jeffer’s sublime enskyment. Properly speaking, vultures are the uplifters of the fallen.
* * *
Disposing of dead bodies is an enormously important task. We have a deep-seated biological aversion to corpses lying around, an instinct which has given rise to our extensive cultural customs and economic apparatus for dealing with human cadavers, not to mention our proclivity for zombie movies. The root of this instinct is probably the biological one, rather than the subsequent cultural overlays: we recognize corpses as dangerous, both as indicators of nebulous causative threats and in themselves as hosts for unhealthy putrefaction. Even in an uncivilized state, we, like most mammals, would not eat rotting animals we happened across in the woods: we know they are not safe.
For us, this issue of “public health” continues to be an understandably major issue: we don’t want a bunch of dead animals laying around town. In many parts of the world, they don’t have CHP employees lugging away roadkill to be laboriously buried—they still let the wild scavengers do their natural work, by far the most efficient contractors for this need of urban sanitation. One could easily discuss this vital service for public health as “the big picture” of vultures’ contribution to the greater good. One could tell stories of the dire consequences that nations have faced upon inadvertently killing off their previously underappreciated corps of flying scavengers: rabid dogs, exploding rodent populations, resurgent disease.
But there is an even more important “big picture” to be painted. It is in many ways the biggest picture: the natural cycles that encompass all life on earth, that require that dead animals be consumed so that their matter can be reused. The global reservoirs of carbon, whether distributed in the soil, concentrated in ancient fuel deposits, or invisibly scattered in the atmosphere, are stocked with living beings that have died. In nature, everything is recycled.
Nothing approaches the efficiency of vulturine disposal. Simply put, vultures are the most effective of the world’s scavengers, and our turkey vulture is the most effective of all the world’s vultures. I have already described two of the traits that elevate vultures within the ranks of the global scavenging fraternity: large size and efficient flight. The first is the basic corollary of large food items that could not be processed quickly enough by smaller organisms. The second enables large, overlapping foraging areas in which numerous individuals can detect a food source and quickly congregate.
When a vulture finds food, he descends, and with their sharp eyes the neighboring vultures soon join him. The chain continues: one vulture quickly becomes a half dozen, which can become fifty should the food source support it. And where the turkey vultures take the lead, the other less astute scavengers follow, finding their prey through mere emulation of that more perceptive bird. For the turkey vulture is the most perceptive of animals, combining the well-recognized acuity of vision of the soaring birds with an unmatched sensitivity to odor. The old world vultures can’t smell. Neither can the condors, or the black-headed vultures. Only this single small genus, composed of the widespread turkey vultures and their relatively localized South American cousins the yellow-headed vultures, possesses this crucial talent. And it makes all the difference.
There have been studies of jungle habitats, where tree cover makes visualization of ground food sources difficult, in which the researchers made the challenge even harder, covering up chicken carcasses with leaves to achieve complete invisibility. When of the appropriate ripeness, turkey vultures found 23 out of 24 of these hidden carcasses within a single day. (Give your carcasses a day to develop some odor, but after three days they become increasingly unappealing—contrary to popular prejudice, vultures don’t want their food to be really rotten.) The mammals didn’t find them—their individual territories are comparatively minute. The other flying scavengers didn’t find them—they can see, but they can’t smell. Only the turkey vultures knew where to look.
We praise eagles for their vision, bloodhounds for their sensitivity to invisible odors. Vultures combine both. Flying above a forest, in which a single bird or rodent died yesterday, a vulture catches that subtle flavor on the wind and unerringly descends where all others see nothing. Friends and rivals watch from across that superterranean network of linked, unblinking sentinels, spot the beacon of that suddenly focused individual and instantly congregate to fill this need of nature, like white blood cells flocking to a threat. And in a handful of hours, at literally the first whiff of danger, they have both taken in and redistributed those cells so recently vacated of their living tenants.
No other creature is so vital a link in this fundamental process. In all the huge expanse of the American continents, there is one bird that has survived the earth’s changes, that crosses forests and plains, that finds the bodies once life has left them, and returns their atoms to the vast reservoir of inchoate life-to-be. Vultures do not bring death, but follow in its shadow; death is not their weapon, but their muse, the scent on the air that tells them where to go.
Embracing this most fundamental role of vultures will be, for some, the most fundamental obstacle to their full appreciation. For some, the mere contemplation of death and the fate of our mortal bodies is unpleasant, or judged unfit for discussion in such banal terms of scavengers and their techniques. But if we want to not just rehabilitate this bird from common prejudice, but to celebrate it, then the subject must be broached. Fear and distaste disguise the truth.
My broad thoughts on death might be quickly classed as the natural nonchalance of youth, which generally spends little time in contemplation of the subject. There are plenty of grave and portentous preachers of mortality who often seem to garner greater deference according to some mass supposition of greater seriousness. I admit the charge of youth. But I remain unconvinced by the doomsayers.
I stand with the ancients, Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans alike, who amid their diverse divergences agreed in this: there is no torturous afterlife to dread. I stand with Montaigne, who thought we confused our avoidance of pain with the fear of death, a transition which in the end is no harder than the passage of waking life to slumber. I stand with Ivan Illich, who found in much of our medical wrangling and expense a fruitless fight against our inevitable demise, encouraged by mere marketing that exploits and magnifies fear, like every other “necessity” of industrial society.
I stand with Emerson, who held that the natural state of the well-employed soul was simple incuriosity of immortality. And most of all I stand with the vultures who embrace and enact his final conclusion: “Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny.” To deny the naturalness of this destiny is to suffer from a superfluous distress built upon an accumulated conformity of superstition and egotism.
In pragmatic specifics, Robinson Jeffers did not simply lie down on a hillside to expire and immediately head skyward via vulture. But he did practice the underlying acceptance he preached in “The Bed by the Window:”
We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
And then it will sound rather like music
When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come, Jeffers.”
I do not aim, in a brief consideration of our noble scavenger, to revise all the world’s thoughts about death. I merely raise this notion, an old one, to which humans have had myriad returns: that the end of life will come, whether it comes quickly or at length, attended by ceremony or attended by nature. Do we turn away from vultures because we avert our eyes from endings? The wind-borne cleansers are not the ones who cut the thread. They await the resolution, take only what’s been left them, pass no judgment on the departed. And so if long years abed are not a continuance you crave, if you are ready to rise when the triple knock sounds, then that posthumous enskyment need be no source of fear.
Header photo: Nero the turkey vulture from the University of Minnesota Raptor Center, portrait by Carolyn Whitson
A magnificent tribute to cathartes aura & their singular place in the life cycle – bravo, Jack! Great photos, too (particularly A. Wyeth image).
Thanks as always Chris!
A few years ago, a deer got a disease and stumbled into the wetlands here to die. A group of 6-7 resident vultures had a feast, picked her bones clean, but then they vanished and there were no more vultures circling here for a year. I wondered if her diseased flesh was poison to them, no matter how hardy they are as a species?
Hi Susan, I think you’re out in the wetlands by Bahia. My parents live out there and I visit regularly and haven’t noticed any intermission in the vulture abundance. It would be very unusual for an extended absence from a given area even if they did manage to eat something toxic on a single occasion due to their large overlapping ranges – new vultures would constantly flow in. On a broader scale, there are some things that vultures can’t process, namely human-introduced toxins such as lead (mainly from ammunition) or certain pharmaceuticals (famously in a cattle medicine that has caused huge declines in vulture populations in India and neighboring countries). But I think the vultures of Bahia are still doing well!
Another beautifully conceived homage, Jack. “Enskyment” indeed!
Wonderful essay Jack. Question: How do they sense the currents of the air? Do they see what we cannot see? Do they have a greater sense of heat detection? Is it just the feel of the wind?
They certainly have better eyesight than us, but I imagine being a vulture in the air is analogous to our experience swimming. Air currents are just like waves, if you are light enough and have wings with large surface areas: they would feel a current of rising air lifting them upwards the way we can imagine being lifted upwards by a current of water. Vision might play a secondary role for seeing indicative movements of clouds, insects, pollen, other birds, etc. in the distance.
Beautiful writing!! We see the vulture family in our back yard put their offspring on the meadow fence in the very early morning to feed them when they are very young. They “nest” in a notch in a 400-year-old valley oak in the backyard. The tree belongs to them and they come often to re-establish that this is their territory. I think they also spend a lot of time in the air above their home, doing their thing.
Wondering where all my birds have gone. My feeders are not being used…only one or two. I’m getting less hummingbirds also. Since there were a couple of hawks in my patio the birds have disappeared.
It is normal for there to be fluctuations in feeder activity, especially during winter when some common feeders birds (notably finches) are less confined to one territory and travel in wider-roaming flocks. Hummingbird activity regularly fluctuates with changing food sources. It is also possible for the presence of a hawk to impact feeder activity: in winter, Cooper’s or sharp-shinned hawks become more abundant and may set up residence in your neighborhood, which can push birds to feed elsewhere than the site of repeat attacks. Hawks will often move on to another location after a few weeks, but there isn’t much you can do to accelerate this natural pattern. Just keep your seed fresh and dry (maybe don’t fill the feeders all the way until activity picks up again) and the birds will return!