Creative nonfiction by Lisa Lanser Rose
This week on This Animal Life, Episode 13, “The Owls of Audubon,” Ann and I discuss raptor rehab facilities and the surprising depth of personality in birds like Pugsley and Turk, who appear in this essay and whom I met at The Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. This essay first appeared in a special edition of Sugar Mule: Women Writing Nature, which you can download for free here.
Pure swamp stretched along the road beside us. New to Florida, my twelve-year-old stepdaughter and I were walking down a narrow road north of the city under a canopy of live oaks draped with Spanish moss that swished like flying horsetails. Beyond the roadside trees, acres of swamp stood silent in winter stillness. A weather front had passed, making Florida, for a day or two, actually cold. Nervous, my stepdaughter scanned the reeds for the bulge of an alligator eye.
“On a day like this, gators are too chilled to charge us,” I said. In the center of the swamp stood one pale, leafless tree, a snag so long dead that only the thickest of its branches remained, raised like arms severed at the elbows. I pointed to the snag and said, “Now there’s something to be worried about.”
“I don’t see anything.” Then, she clapped her hand over her open mouth.
On every branch slouched two or three black-cloaked figures, their bare heads snug between their shoulders.
A compulsive bird watcher, I happened to have a small set of binoculars with me. I zeroed in on one gnarled red head. It looked like something that ought to be surgically stitched back into a torso. Its head was the end of a ham bone thrown to a dog. It was the knob of a macabre cane. “Check it out,” I said, passing her the binoculars.
“Gro-o-o-oss,” she breathed.
They flapped and bumped each other. Newcomers soared in and knocked the others off their roosts. Among the turkey vultures jostled their somewhat less gruesome cousins, the black vultures, identical but for the more agreeable black of their heads. I watched one in flight to make certain it wasn’t a juvenile turkey vulture, and there flashed the triangular white wing patches that distinguish it. I tried to show her, but already she was losing interest, alert again for gators and reminiscing about the bay horse we had just visited, a thoroughbred mare who pranced the circle of her pen and whirled to face us, head high and ears pricked, chest muscles twitching, all of her splendid, ready to vanish in the sound of her own thunder.
“I think she liked us.”
“She did,” I agreed.
A band of buzzards in a dead tree couldn’t capture a horse-crazy twelve-year-old girl’s imagination. I wondered why they should capture mine. I made her linger while I studied the rows of short feathers on their scalps like raised and worried eyebrows on a wrinkled forehead. They had shady slouch, thugs in a dime-store doorway. I put the binoculars back in my pocket and took one last look with my naked eye. In the sinking winter sunlight, the snag, having shed its bark, gleamed like bone. The buzzards had to this skeleton of a tree to sleep their night away, side by side, heads tucked under wings. They settled on their bellies like oversized chickens.
As we walked on toward our car, I asked myself why such harmless homebodies horrified us. Crows are no different. They scavenge roadsides, raid garbage bags, and kill songbird nestlings, but while the word “vulture” wrinkles our noses, we think the crow a slick, winning bird. Some call the better-looking black vulture a “carrion crow,” which gives them swank. Crows make meaningful sounds, the way dolphins and elephants do. As children, we read Aesop’s fable, “The Crow and the Pitcher,” about a crow clever enough to drop pebbles into a pitcher to raise the water level until it could drink. It turns out Aesop knew his crows. Crows can count: if seven people walk behind a blind where there’s food, crows won’t approach until seven people have left. They solve problems that other birds can’t, such as how to reach a treat dangling from a string. With beak and claw, in a hand-over-hand motion, they reel it in. Crows play in snow, sliding downhill on their backs and then flying uphill to do it again. We like these smart, playful animals, despite the fact that we catch them in the middle of the road prying the guts out of a mangled squirrel. Cool-headed, they flit aside to let cars pass, and we never hold our breath, even though, should we have passed a vulture at the same meal, we would have sworn we smelled the stench even with windows up. The vulture stumbles out of the way, peering over its shoulder like a beaten dog. The fact is we’re biased toward the beautiful. Handsomely proportioned, the crow sports a sleek outfit of go-anywhere black. It’s a perching bird, an oversized songbird or passerine. It’s the cousin of the blue jay, the magpie, and other well-dressed winners in the Wall Street of avian life.
We have the same bias toward sea gulls. We see them raid our picnic blankets, eat offal tossed by fishermen, gobble dead fish on rancid shorelines, and cackle up a rowdy time at our garbage dumps. Watch a little longer, and you’ll see the handsome aerialist joyfully mob the cornucopia spilling from a sewage pipe. We might think them irritating, but rarely disgusting, never ghoulish. The same goes for our own dogs. Take your dog to a farm, and he’ll help himself to cow pie. Take him to the river, and he’ll roll in otter scat. If he finds a piece of carrion, he’ll try to choke it down before you can pry it from his mouth. In fact, dogs and vultures will vie side-by-side for the best seats at larger carcasses. Yet the dog shares our homes and fights us for space on our own beds. Some of us bankrupt ourselves to pay for veterinary care for the same animal that stole a maxi-pad out of the trash and ate it, leaving the telltale pink plastic shield and tatters on the rug for our guests to blush over. However indiscreet, dogs are beautiful or cute, and so we adore them wiggling in a lap or working their paws bloody on the rubble of the World Trade Center. If dogs commit occasional vulgarities, we excuse them as we do children. Those acts are vestigial, no doubt, leftover from lupine beginnings. With their strong antiseptic digestive systems and dicey lives in the wild, wolves sometimes have to resort to desperate dinners, turning their sensitive noses toward stuff that would make us humans retch. Don’t people whose lives are at stake do the same—or worse?
When you think California Condor, the syllables alone send a silhouette flying across the mind’s eye, but the condor is a fellow member of the family Cathartidae and the order Ciconiiformes—it’s a hulking vulture. When I hear the word “vulture,” I see a scruffy, bald-headed bird glowering on a tombstone. How that image got into my catalogue of clichés, I don’t know—Snoopy, the fierce vulture awaiting his next victim? But scavengers have no victims, and corpse consumption isn’t a crime at all—it’s community service. It makes no sense to think of vultures hanging around cemeteries, because vultures can’t operate backhoes, nor can they burrow six feet under to chisel through wood, and I’m fairly sure they have no taste for embalming fluid. I can’t see how they would learn to beg mourners for scraps of their dead the way gulls have learned to beg for crusts at beachside picnics. The image of a vulture in a cemetery may have burned itself into our collective memories during times of war and plague, when we had to pile our dead the way we do garbage, without the ceremony of embalming, shrouding, coffining, and digging a deep hole more private than a bathroom stall in which we can get down to the business of indelicate rot. Perhaps in such dire times, buzzards learned to watch for us delivering the freshly dead, which, despite their reputations, seems to be their preference over turned meat. As we approached communal graves or battlefields, we would see vultures wet with human blood, tugging on skin, plucking out eyeballs, and working their wet heads in human abdomens the way surgeons work their hands. Some of us would have known and loved the person under the buzzard’s bill. Encounters like that could create a hatred to span the generations.
Mostly the loathing seems to belong to us so-called westerners. Some sun-splashed cultures thank the buzzard for keeping the village clean, and others have even included its mortuary skills in their funeral ceremonies. They say the birds carry the dead to heaven piece by piece or reconstitute them in their bellies for future rebirth. Some honor it for its long-term monogamy and dutiful parenting the way we do The Waltons.
All these traits could redeem the bird’s image, I thought as I looked back at the red heads, except for the fact that they’re ugly. The turkey vulture’s head resembles too frankly the flesh it tears. Its beak is the color of bone. Ousted from the raptor category upon DNA evidence and shifted into the stork family, the vulture has been denied the reflected glory of eagles and falcons and other breathtaking killers. It does resemble the wood stork, which stands moribund by stagnant ponds with its wrinkled, gray skull slung low. Walking along a pond in Saint Petersburg one afternoon, I came around a stand of shrubs and surprised one particularly dismal specimen. It showed me a face that appeared to be in advanced stages of decomposition and blinked its dejected eye. Like its buzzard brothers, the wood stork soars on thermals and has no voice but a grunt. Like vultures, it takes carrion, but primarily preys on small fish, frogs, and fledglings, putting it more in company with egrets and herons but for that zombie face and the stain of DNA. As if roused from a drugged sleep, wood stork I’d surprised broke its gloomy gaze, opened its white-and-black-banded wings and flapped, flapped, dipping its toes, once, twice in the water, and left me to regard it from a distance, at which it became a heart-stoppingly beautiful bird.
We usually know the vulture by its characteristic wide V in flight, wing tips lifted like pinkies at a tea party. Many of us mistake it for a raptor, and I rarely correct anyone who looks up and says, “Ooh! A hawk!” since they’re usually crestfallen when I say, “I think that’s a vulture.” Few species can soar as well as the turkey vulture, who flies the way we fly with parachutes, gliders, theme parks, and dreams—effortless sailing through space. In flight, the turkey vulture rivals the albatross, the greater storm petrel, and the magnificent frigate bird for its ability to travel miles with little more effort than it takes to doze. Its wing-load allows it to float like a paper kite cut loose in the sky. Rarely flapping, it circles and rises on air thermals, then, when it reaches the top, glides to the next, soaring almost indefinitely. Even the better-looking black vulture and the mighty condor have to flap more often than the turkey vulture.
We had moved to downtown Tampa, which is home to a wake of vultures that numbers well over fifty. They sleep on the roof of an abandoned hotel, sun themselves on the pyramidal top of the SunTrust building, and spend the day surfing the heat that rises off the city. As they soar past the office towers, their ominous and easy flight must taunt the workers whose lives are boxed in cubicles.
The other day I was downtown walking along the bay when a man elbowed his friend, “Look—a hawk!”
A vulture sailed overhead. I thought I’d try something new. “That’s an Eastern Condor,” I said.
“Wow!” They paused, squinting at the sky, thrilling at the way the bird floated and turned and rose a little higher as if by will alone.
The turkey vulture’s way of skating thermals is why, when we spot one overhead, it’s always circling, but we take its looping flight to be nature’s silent ambulance siren. We suppose some poor dying creature lies exposed on the ground below, in a clearing, hapless without a cell phone. To assume that where there’s a buzzard there’s a corpse sells the buzzard short. A social bird like the parrot and crow, the vulture lives a more complex life than we imagine, since we assume, like the shark, it’s little more than a flesh-ripper. Vultures may be congregating, courting, foraging, playing games of tag, or simply turning circles and soaking up sun. Curious, clever birds, vultures investigate more than lifeless bodies. I know because I met two of them at the Boyd Hill Nature Preserve in Saint Petersburg, Florida, which cares for injured raptors that can never be released in the wild. Along with the bald eagle, red-tailed hawk, and screech owls are two turkey vultures named Pugsley and Turk. Those who work with them have grown fond of them—and defensive about it. They’re quick to mention Pugsley and Turk are by far the smartest birds in the aviary, which is why theirs is the only pen with dog toys. Turkey vultures will play tug-of-war, bump beach balls back and forth with their heads, and play keep-away. “The turkey vulture has more personality than all the other birds combined. He tilts his head when you talk to him, and I have always had the feeling that he understands everything I say,” Sam Foster, a volunteer, wrote in a Boyd Hill newsletter. “I can’t begin to explain how much I love these birds and what a privilege it is to care for them.”
I once watched Turk eat a raw chicken egg. Lifting it gently in his beak, he held it as high as he could, then dropped it. Several attempts to crack it this way made nothing but small depressions in the sand. Finally, he carried it to the back of his pen where he tossed it against the wall. This time it landed with a small hole in the shell into which he worked his beak round and round, nibbling and swallowing and scraping until the inside was as smooth and dry as the outside, almost as if it had been blown clean by a Chinese egg painter.
Vultures live smart, sociable lives, even to the point of befriending people and following them around the neighborhood like flying dogs. Knowing they can be as affectionate as a family parrot, however, can’t make up for the bad press. We can’t keep the scalpel-billed vulture as a pet, can’t eat it, and now that we have funeral parlors, the vulture is nothing but lugubrious. Contemptible. Sick.
It gets worse.
Without a song to woo us, the vulture can only hiss and grunt. These sun worshipers bake themselves in the sky or open-winged on fence posts and cool themselves by squirting liquid feces on their legs. When threatened, they shoot vomit that stinks as if pumped straight from an outhouse. When cornered or caught brooding young, the cowards just keel over. Farmers claim buzzards make a wicked snack of lamb eyes and piglet tails. There was a time when they were blamed for killing the livestock they scavenged, particularly newborn calves. We trapped and bludgeoned them by the thousands from Florida to Texas. It must’ve felt right and mighty to snuff entire colonies of these creeps. Buzzards may be enviable flyers, superior to eagles, but their morbid soaring as they search for corpses darkens our spirits, for along the ground beneath them they cast the skating shadow of death.
“Look out,” we nudge our friends when we see one. “He’s coming for you.”
As my stepdaughter and I left the vulture roost behind and walked down the road in the quickening chill of dusk, I felt no disgust. The sight of vultures bedding down for the night reminded me of our family parrots tucking in, ruffled and settled on their perches; my finches flitting into their nest boxes and chirring goodnight to each other; my grandfather’s parakeets, lining up on the highest perches in the aviary, fluffing themselves, and closing their eyes. Birds have been members of my family since before I was born, and, as I’d watched them through my lens, I caught myself loving vultures.
One incident can overshadow everything else. An otherwise warm-hearted holiday may be remembered only for the meal during which one relative misbehaved, or perhaps we ourselves were the ones who let a grievance or too much bourbon foul the gathering. Such a blight can sustain a feud, cinch a divorce, turn the course of a family’s history. The injury may never be worse than when we’re the guilty ones. Perhaps we hate the vulture most because we can’t forgive ourselves for the rude act we’re all destined to commit, like it or not, by turning into a corpse.
As we drove home on the highway, I passed my first dead egret, a surprise package, bundled in its own wings, a waste of white. When I blew by at seventy miles an hour, its feathers lifted like fingers waving an idle bye-bye.
A vulture would come. The large claw rolls the egret on its back, and the bone-white beak surgically snips a coroner’s incision mid-belly, easily snapping feather shafts and hollow ribs. The vulture’s beak, longer than it seems hidden in its red fleshy sheath, slips into the cavity crosswise to the incision and opens, prying the ribs wide. In dips the beak, and out spiral the intestines, wet and red and yellow, unraveling like a pulled knit. These get set aside as unsavory. In slips the beak again, and the spleen meets its first light, but only for a moment. Organ by organ, gizzard, liver, and crop, the vulture nibbles and swallows. Then comes the heart, and it too passes from bird to bird, soon to lift into the sky again.