Photo by Al Batt
I’ve never done much trick-or-treating.
At Halloween, I dressed up in an old sheet with holes cut for eyes, or wore a fragile, plastic mask with elastic strings that broke quickly.
I wore my costume to the school where I got candy – everybody got the same candy and traded it with others. We bobbed for apples, which gave everybody the chance to catch the latest illness going around. We had learned to share in kindergarten.
The best costume won a silver dollar donated by the bank. A banker’s kid won every year.
I wanted to go as a bird, but which one? Many children have been told they eat like a bird. A hummingbird can eat its weight in food each day. No child can do that.
Then I saw my first turkey vulture, which the neighbors incorrectly called a buzzard. It flew in a slight dihedral — a rocky flight. Vultures fly in thermals. They wear long underwear to help them soar. They feed on carrion and could eat a carrion pigeon. Carrion my wayward son.
I wanted to go as a vulture for Halloween. My mother said, “We’ll see.”
She couldn’t find a vulture mask. I went as a discount superhero with a plastic mask and a cape made from an old sheet with eyeholes in it.
The next year, I went as a ghost. I wore a sheet with no eyeholes cut in it. Mom didn’t want to ruin another sheet. I went bump in the night.
Traveling humans complain about eating on the road. Too many roller dogs and stale doughnuts.
But for a vulture, roads are meant for eating; even if some have so much traffic, vultures are barely able to take a single photograph of their food before they must take to the air to keep from becoming roadkill.
The turkey vulture is a humble bird that’s part of the cleanup crew. The road is a drive-through restaurant for a vulture. It blesses a meal and the Kia that prepared it. A tractor-trailer rig becomes a food truck. Vultures eat things left dead on the road without the aid of any roadkill helper. Vultures have a digestive system that allows them to eat things no certified nutritionist would recommend. A vulture’s internal machinery is amazing, with a stomach acid that gives it a cast-iron stomach. And they eat with no need for an antacid.
They eat rotten pumpkins and cow manure, but they don’t eat road gators, those large pieces of tire tread left behind on a road after a commercial truck or semi-trailer suffers a blowout. Why don’t vultures eat road gators? The gators don’t contain enough protein.
Vultures regurgitate partially digested food as a defense. It’s such an effective defense that it’s sometimes employed by a toddler in a highchair. Vultures are talented actors, not unlike opossums. A vulture’s head flops over, and its mouth is agape as it plays dead. It’s not to defraud a life insurance company. It’s an attempt to trick a predator.
The turkey vulture was once a southern bird but now breeds in Canada. Why aren’t vultures here in the winter? It’s not that they don’t like frozen foods; it’s that it’s difficult to fly while carrying a microwave oven to defrost the frozen foods. Vultures lack the proper bill or talons to tear a carcass apart.
Vultures don’t visit bird feeders unless you place a road-killed critter on one. They spread their wings wide while perched in trees. It’s a horaltic pose meant to warm them, eliminate bacteria and ectoparasites, and dry feathers.
Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? That was a Carpenters’ hit sung while filling a bird feeder.
Why do vultures appear every time you are near? You are in an old cowboy movie or TV show featuring wide-brimmed hats. You are crawling across a desert and vultures circle overhead in an invisible roundabout in the sky. They circle endlessly without getting the least bit dizzy and needing to regurgitate.
How can you tell if a vulture has been doing efficient work on a road near you?
If you see the chalk outlines of raccoons or opossums, you will know that a vulture has been there.
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