Today is international Turkey Vulture Day. If you don’t know what a Turkey Vulture is, look up in the sky, you’re bound to see one circling high above without even flapping its wings like normal birds. They just glide through the air. When I was a kid I always thought they were hawks because, you know, vultures only live in the desert (I learned that from cartoons).
My favorite place to watch the vultures is on Millbrook Mountain in Minnewaska State Park. There are always a large number of them soring the skies near the cliffs where the thermals are good. One day there were so many of them, we couldn’t count them, well over a hundred.
I don’t bring my camera on my hikes anymore because I have far too many pictures of mountain views, but I often wish I had my camera when we visit the vultures. Cell phone cameras are terrible for photographing wildlife with their 20mm wide-angle lenses, but I managed to catch these three Black Vultures while hiking Gertrude’s Nose a couple of weeks ago.
Of all the places we could have hiked that day, I’m glad we picked the nose (sorry, I had to say it).
From a distance, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a black vulture and a turkey vulture, but up close, the red head of the turkey vulture gives it away. It looks, well, like a turkey. That’s about the limit of my knowledge of the birds. If you really want to know about vultures you’ll have to ask my step-sister, Dianne. She’s an expert on the species.
So far, vultures haven’t turned up in any of my books, except perhaps Beyond Blue 2, The Cloxian Revelation. In that book, there are large predator birds called Giest, although they have more in common with a pterodactyl than a vulture. They sit in the trees at the edge of a field and wait for an unsuspecting animal to cross, then they swoop down and attack. They have no qualms about preying on people as Bromier discovers when he attempts to find a medicinal plant to save a child’s life. You’ll have to read the book when I finish it to find out what happens.
Jeffrey David Montanye
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