muninnhuginn | Vulture Culture

An Op-Ed piece in today's NYTimes, Neighborly Vultures, begins "There is really nothing adorable about vultures, adorable in human terms, that is."

No? Apart from the handsome black feathers and their enjoyment of sunning them? Apart from their all-too-human laziness. Why fly, when you can walk? Why scavenge in the fields if you can besiege a local butcher's shop? Why look further than that tasty morsel of road kill?

We've only come into close contact with one turkey vulture, Fred (who did once wander off to the butcher's shop in the small town near his home at a butterfly (and falconry!) centre to the consternation of the locals). Turkey vulture's are New World vultures, so quite possibly the ones being referred to in the article. Fred, like his relatives, is lovely. He may well, as a chick, have looked like a "skinhead" with a "switchblade beak", but there's no harm in that, is there? We've seen some pretty handsome skinheads in our time, and blades is, well, blades--sharp, deadly, and sexy.

The piece "accuses" vultures of only having "only the beauty of adaptation, of pure function, and its function -- feeding on animal remains -- is not a glamorous one" as if there were really no value, practical or aesthetic, in perfect form and function. Like the problems with crows flourishing in Japan due to the plentiful supply of rubbish bags ("packed lunch, anyone?) they're victims of their own success at tidying up after the untidy human population.

And what if these birds do "smell like what they eat"? Isn't it one of those (possibly accurate) truisms that westerners smell of milk to folk from those cultures who don't continue drinking milk into adulthood. Rotting meat or sour milk? Which is worse? And what is more disgusting: the act of littering, of not clearing up one's own mess, or of scavenging, leaving the place tidier for all?

We're with the birds on this one. If we woke up to "a colony of roosting vultures doing their regenerating [a reference to the vulture's "critical role in the regenerative cycle of nature"] just over the fence" we'd be pleased. The starling's in the roof might be a bit put out, tho'.