Meet Your Neighbors

Turkey Vultures: Soaring Scavengers

Photo: Elli Glist

Rising on a thermal on their six-foot wingspans, soaring turkey vultures can be an inspiring sight on a summer day. They often seem to be having a great time up there, swooping, reeling, and diving — even if they’re just searching for their next meal.

Back on earth, though, turkey vultures have a hard time getting respect. Sure, they’re ugly, with bright red naked heads, a mean-looking white beak, and flaring nostrils. And they have certain, um, personal habits that strike people as unnecessarily messy. Still, there’s something endearing about a bird that will play dead to protect its young. Keep your distance from such a prostrate bird, though; it might escalate its defense to the most serious weapon in its arsenal: forcefully regurgitating its last meal in your direction. See what we mean about personal habits?

Despite its lack of social graces, the turkey vulture, Cathartes aura, is vital to our area’s ecology as part of nature’s clean-up crew. As people and cars become more numerous, so have dead animals, a turkey vulture’s only food source. That, combined with global warming, has created a population explosion of turkey vultures in northern Illinois, according to scientists at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS). Breeding Bird Survey data show vulture numbers increasing at a rate of more than 12 percent per year. “One hundred years ago, turkey vultures only bred as far north as Marion, Illinois,” says INHS research scientist Mike Ward. “Fifty years ago, they were breeding only as far north as Peoria. Now, we find turkey vultures breeding in almost every part of Illinois.”

According to biologist Michael Mossman of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, vultures return to southern Wisconsin in mid to late March, laying eggs in early April. Most hatch into fluffy white chicks by late May. Young leave the nest by the end of August as independent adults, ready to use their keen smell and sight to find recently deceased animals.

What they don’t seem to be sensitive to is the smell of their own homes. Bill Lynch, president of the Turkey Vulture Society, notes that it can be pretty easy to locate a vulture nest. When vultures soar above a single spot for a number of days, a nest is almost certainly below. Don’t approach until late June, or risk scaring the parents away permanently. After that, let your nose be your guide. Parents regurgitate food in copious quantities for the young and also defecate on their own feet to keep cool, a process called urohydrosis. Vultures nest in hollow logs or trees, as well as crevices, caves, and abandoned buildings. (Researchers in southern Illinois in 1984 found that 70 percent of abandoned buildings had a vulture family in them.)

Photo: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

“I’m amazed, though, that the birds themselves don’t stink at all,” says Lynch. “Actually, they smell kind of sweet.” Their bald head is partially responsible, says Mark Spreyer, director of Stillman Nature Center in South Barrington. “It’s a brilliant adaptation. They sit in the sun and let the ultraviolet light kill any bacteria they might have picked up from their last meal.”

Spreyer is a big fan of turkey vultures. “They provide a great service,” he says, “and they are magnificent when they are soaring.” And how can you not like a bird that inspires jokes like this in a guy: “A turkey vulture walks into an airport carrying a dead possum and a dead raccoon. ‘Sir, you can’t board the airplane with those,’ he is told in no uncertain terms. ‘You’re only allowed one piece of carrion.’”

— Nancy Shepherdson