On Vultures

This weekend, driving with my mom down highway 101, I knew it must be spring. I’d just seen my first turkey vulture of the season. Actually, vultures. They were “kettling”—the term used to describe a group of raptors, but especially of vultures, all circling together on the same thermal, wide wings sweeping round in every intersecting paths. It’s hard to see the bald red head through the windshield of a car. The chalky white feet—chalky from the birds’ own antibacterial urates—are invisible. Instead the sun catches on outspread feathers, turns black to silver as finger-like pinion feathers shape the wind.  

            I used to know a vulture personally. Her name was Clyde (vultures don’t come in pink or blue—gender’s a guessing game, till the bird lays an egg). Clyde lives at the Oregon Zoo. If you’ve ever watched the bird of prey show in the summer, you’ve seen her—she’s the one who went out of her way to brush your hat with her wingtip. Clyde likes to fly low. She likes to buzz people. She likes to get away with things. Mischievous: yes. Intelligent: vultures come third, after parrots and those pesky corvid crows. Clyde knows her handlers, knows the show commands, knows exactly what Tupperware containers hold (you don’t want to). She doesn’t know how to be a wild vulture. She was abandoned by her parents before she could learn to fend for herself or find food. Unlucky, but lucky to have been found and rescued.

            I think of Clyde, every spring when the vultures come back from California, from Mexico, from even farther south. Bald-headed, barefooted, they can’t winter here. Every fall Clyde gets restless as her wild relatives head south. Her handlers have to take a little more care to pull up their thick leather gloves. She gets a heat lamp in her “mew” but it isn’t quite enough. The keepers give her delicacies—raw herring, rat guts—to make up for the freedom she doesn’t have. In the wild those musty-smelling feathers of hers would be spread in the wind. She’d put her bald head to use. Have you ever tried, after all, to eat without hands? To eat, say, a plate of spaghetti? You wouldn’t want hair (or feathers) on your head either. Especially if that spaghetti was a carcass. Especially if the parts you most wanted to eat were right down inside. After eating, Clyde would spend the sunny California winter sitting with her wings spread wide, letting the sun bake bacteria from her feathers. The food she’d just consumed might have made another animal sick, might have begun the spread of an epidemic like anthrax. Vultures are cleaner than we think, and they clean things up for us.

             I said goodbye to Clyde a year ago. I couldn’t go to school full time and work both days of the weekend. She’s still there though. Soon her trainers will start prepping her for summer shows. Driving with my mom, I crane till at last I lose sight of the vultures. Clyde’s probably craning too, waiting for spring.