While fishing the other day, a friend said, “Look at all those buzzards flying around.”
Before processing the statement, I had to process the word, “buzzard.”
Now I am far from a linguist or an etymologist, and I was definitely not Miss Varner’s favorite student in high school English, but certain words set off bells in my head when I hear them. Such as when someone says, “poisonous,” when the correct word is “venomous.” Or when someone says “less” when the correct word is “fewer.”
“Buzzard” is one of those words.
There are no buzzards in the Western hemisphere. The word “buzzard” came from Europe with the early settlers, and in Europe it refers to a type of hawk, not a vulture.
There are vultures in every continent except Australia and Antarctica, and they are all called vultures, not buzzards.
The birds that we were looking at flying above the river were black vultures, one of two types of vultures in the Southeast. Turkey vultures are the other species.
Here on the Cumberland Plateau, I have only ever seen turkey vultures. But if you drop down 1,000 feet in elevation on either side of the Plateau, you will see both species. I don’t know if the reason is the elevation or some other factor, but that has been my observation.
The species are very similar, but easy to tell apart with a little experience.
Adult turkey vultures have red, featherless heads, while black vulture have grey heads. The absence of feathers on their heads makes these birds look a little sinister, but it serves a purpose.
Vultures provide a great service by cleaning up dead animals that nobody else wants to touch. When your life involves sticking your head inside a dead deer’s body cavity for the good stuff, it’s nice not to have feathers getting mucked up with gunky goo.
Most birds don’t have a very good sense of smell. They don’t need it because they hunt by sight. Vultures hunt by sight and smell. If you are looking for dead flesh, smell can help.
Supposedly turkey vultures have a better sense of smell than black vultures, so black vultures have learned to keep a close eye on their cousins and often follow the turkey vultures to the source of the smell.
Hawks and owls have strong feet, because these raptors catch and kill their prey with their talons. Vultures don’t need powerful talons to kill their food; they just need strong beaks to tear flesh, and stomach acid — stronger than battery acid — to kill botulism, anthrax, cholera bacteria and other bad stuff fermenting inside a putrid carcass.
Vultures eat food that no other animal would, or could.
Vultures soar and glide to search for carrion. Flapping wings takes lots of energy; soaring doesn’t. Vultures are experts of finding warm updrafts to allow them to stay aloft using little energy. Even glider pilots know to watch for vultures to find thermals.
Although we often see dead animals on, or beside a highway, like the current three dead dear along Interstate 40 between here and Knoxville, that’s not a safe place to land and eat.
A vulture’s food needs to be dead, in the open, and away from traffic. It would be nice for everyone, if some brave soul would drag those dead deer to an open field so the vultures could make good use of that protein that is just rotting away.
The reason we see so many vultures hanging around the river where we fish is, I think, for two reasons.
First, there are a lot of people fishing on the river, and some people clean the fish on the shore and leave the remains. That is free pickings for the vultures.
And second, when they run the generators at the dam to produce electricity, fish sometimes get sucked through the turbines, chopped up and washed to shore downstream. Again, free dead stuff.
They may be ugly to some, but ornithologists think that vultures are among the most intelligent birds. In captivity, they learn quickly, and can even solve problems that usually only a few birds like crows or parrots can solve.
The next time you look up and see a large, dark bird soaring majestically in the sky, appreciate another beautiful part of nature.
And remember, you are looking at a vulture, not a buzzard.
Comments, questions or suggestions for future nature articles are welcome at don.hazel@gmail.com.