The turkey vulture is an unusual neighbor. On sunny days you can see one or more circling lazily in the sky. Their long wings are hard to miss. The turkey vulture’s wingspan is over 5 feet, about the same as a local Canada goose. That’s just a foot shy of a bald eagle’s wingspan.
Turkey vultures rarely move quickly. As solar heat produces updrafts a turkey vulture, or small group, floats on air. There’ll be some teetering. The long wing-tip feathers will spread like fingers. Turkey vultures read the wind, the direction of drift, make adjustments to keep floating.
The turkey vulture is Oregon’s only resident vulture. Its two closest relatives: the smaller, more aggressive, black vulture of eastern North America and tropics; and the California condor which is once again released into the wild after near-extinction. The turkey vulture faces no known threats at this time. t is the most abundant vulture on the planet. A recent estimate: 18 million. Turkey vultures range from southern Canada to the southern tip of Chile and Argentina.
A scavenger, the turkey vulture prefers small, fresh carcasses. It does not attack living prey often as does the black vulture. Food items cover a broad menu from insects and mollusks to mammals, birds and even occasionally fruit or berries. Roadkill and dead livestock help provide plenty of food now.
Turkey vultures have keen eyes. Further, they have a sharp sense of smell. Experiments show turkey vultures are more efficient at finding a carcass than mammal scavengers. As turkey vultures drift overhead they are looking. Also, they analyze the molecules that come through their nostrils. One attractive chemical is ethyl mercaptan. It is quickly released from a mammal corpse. The turkey vultures needs only a few molecules per billion to confirm a food source. Then the bird circles, honing into where the mercaptan is being released.
The natural gas industry puts mercaptan into the gas. Even we can smell it in a kitchen. If a gas pipeline begins to leak the turkey vultures will sense the mercaptan and circle the location. Then gas companies can make the repair.
Turkey vultures do not get many bacterial diseases that kill other birds. They are immune to botulism, anthrax, and salmonella. Turkey vultures can die from tuberculosis they pick up from mammals. They can die of avian flu. They can get lead poisoning from shot-riddled corpses of deer and game birds. Now they are legally protected, and not often shot any more. In former times they were often slaughtered for allegedly spreading disease, which turned out to be false. Their digestive tract kills many infectious microbes.
These are social birds, often roosting and nesting in colonies of hundreds or thousands. Sometimes people on the ground complain of the excrement and want the birds moved or killed. My thought would be: what turkey vultures clean up and recycle is far more problematic than what they deposit.
Most of our turkey vultures migrate south in fall and begin to return in March. Why? They can’t deal with frozen meat.
For information about upcoming Salem Audubon programs and activities, see www.salemaudubon.org, or Salem Audubon’s Facebook page.
Harry Fuller is an Oregon birder and natural history author of “Freeway Birding” and the newly-published “Birding Harney County.” He is a member of the Salem Audubon Society. Contact him at [email protected] or atowhee.blog. His “Some Fascinating Things About Birds” column appears regularly in Salem Reporter.
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Harry Fuller is an Oregon birder and natural history author of three books: “Freeway Birding,” "Great Gray Owls of California, Oregon and Washington," and "San Francisco's Natural History--Sand Dunes to Streetcars." He leads birding trips for the Malheur Field Station. He is a member of the Salem Audubon Society, and leads bird trips locally. Harry has just published a new book, BIrding Harney County.
