“BUZZARDS!”
That’s what the late Gladys Black, “Iowa’s Bird Lady,” called the turkey vultures that she loved to watch soaring over the Des Moines River valley as she walked home from Burch Country School near her childhood home east of Pleasantville.
Some of her ornithologist friends chided Gladys for continuing to use the colloquial name – but few could dispute her fondness for the birds’ mastery of the air, as they seemed to float forever on thermals, with hardly a wingbeat.
No matter that dull-black vultures lack the striking yellow-black colors of Iowa’s state bird, the goldfinch, or the flame-orange brilliance of the Baltimore orioles that flock to our jelly feeder. Or that vultures sustain themselves by feeding on dead critters. That’s evolutionarily why vultures have featherless - some would say ugly - red heads. They don’t have to worry about soiling their feathers when they probe with their beak inside a decomposing carcass!
Vultures must not worry about dirty feet, either, since they defecate on their feet to cool off in hot weather.
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology scientists say the part of a vulture’s brain that can process odors is much larger than in most other birds, allowing the vultures to detect dead animals at a distance or hidden in trees. Cornell also explains that vultures’ potent stomach acids kill most disease organisms, protecting the birds from getting sick themselves.
As a farm kid, I was fascinated by the circling vultures that might signal the death of a calf in the back pasture. That fascination only grew when I later learned of Gladys’s admiration for “buzzards.”
Thus, we were delighted to discover that turkey vultures sometimes roosted in our woods along the Turkey River. It became an evening pastime to watch a dozen or more of the birds circle over the distant ridge, then drop one-by-one into the treetops
“Our” vultures usually hang around into October, then drift southward for the winter, returning about late March. It’s a sure sign of autumn when they depart for the southern U. S. or even into South America – and a harbinger of spring when the first buzzards come back.
An Elkader friend regularly counted scores of vultures settling into a pine grove near his home for the night. And Elkader residents on dewy mornings often are treated to flocks of vultures hanging their wings out to dry from perches high atop the Innovative Ag grain silos
With almost daily connections with turkey vultures, I should not have been surprised when Mike, a friend who was checking his deer hunting tree stand on our property, was startled by a commotion coming from a nearby hollow basswood stump. He almost fell off of his perch when a turkey vulture emerged from the cavity!
Mike set up a trail camera focused on the stump and recorded a couple of month’s worth of comings and goings. Sure enough, a scruffy-looking juvenile vulture, mottled with white down and developing gray-black-brown feathers, confirmed our assumption that the vultures had nested in the basswood
I didn’t attempt to climb up to look into the cavity – partly because I did not want to disturb the family, and partly because I did not care to risk the perils of vulture vomit. A vulture’s main defense strategy is to regurgitate digested food onto encroaching enemies!
Of course, if you’re a baby vulture, you welcome regurgitated food. When an adult returns to the nest to feed its offspring, the young stick their bills into the parent’s gullet for a meal of “soup.”
Arthur Cleveland Bent, author of the classic series, “Life Histories of North American Birds,” wrote that “one of the first associations that the nestlings learn is that of the odor of decomposing animal matter with appetite and good digestion.”
“Gross!” my grandkids would say. But wouldn’t it be even more gross to have carcasses of raccoons, opossums, deer, and other road-killed critters grilling in the summer sun along our highways? Thanks be to vultures for cleaning up the victims.
Bent wrote in praise of the “buzzard’s” place in the ecosystem:
A turkey vulture “does not inflict death, but searches and watches and waits until it comes upon the dead. Then the feast begins.”
For a turkey vulture video, check out Cedar Creek Nature Notes, a Substsck column by my friend Robert Leonard, who often shares his observations during hikes at Cedar Creek, in Marion County. Cedar Creek Nature Notes
Thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative for reconnecting me with several old friends from my 25 years as outdoor water/photographer with the Des Moines Register from 1972 to 1997. Plus the group has helped me discover the talents and insights of a new (to me) set of writers. I‘m looking forward to sharing my Iowa roots, memories, observations, frustrations, and joys with those folks - and with readers.
I come at this endeavor as an Iowa farm kid who has never outgrown playing in the “crick.” I believe that every kid should have that same opportunity to go outside and get muddy. And I can easily wax nostalgic about the wild places we have lost in my seven-plus decades on this planet. For more about where those times, people, and adventures have led me, here’s a link to my website.
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Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake
Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley
Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County
Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji
Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames
Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines
Nik Heftman, The Seven Times, Los Angeles and Iowa
Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla
Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines
Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo
Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames
Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey
LettersfromIowans, Iowa
Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa
Darcy Maulsby: Keepin’ It Rural, Lake City
Kurt Meyer, Showing Up, St. Ansgar
Wini Moranville, Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines
Kyle Munson, Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines
Jane Nguyen, The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines
John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines
Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines
Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains, Washington, D.C.
Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Urbandale
Macey Spensley, The Midwest Creative, Davenport and Des Moines
Larry Stone, Listening to the Land, Elkader
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona
Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County
Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport
Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines
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makes my blood boil, too. and I can just hear Gladys cussing at the stupidity1
Wonderful story, Larry. Here in Fairfield, the TVs massing on the town water tower in fall was becoming an icon of the city. But last year (or the one before) someone representing the state of Iowa decided to discourage the birds by hanging a dead vulture in effigy from the tower. I guess people thought the hanged dead bird was a lovelier sight than 40 live birds socializing on the tower in the evening. I was unable to determine who was actually responsible. Still boils my blood every time I look up at the tower.