Coming Close to Vultures
Eight turkey vultures are roosting on top of my neighbor’s feed-barn. It’s 4pm, Tuesday, and I am crouched fifty yards behind them in the woods. I’m back-paddling forward with my hood up. No eye contact. No snapped twigs. I walk ten feet in a minute. Slowest and quietest I ever have. This is it. This is my peak in life.
But when I get within thirty yards, they bolt.
I have tried to approach these specific vultures, these gangly, slightly grotesque but oddly beautiful birds, dozens of times, always to the same end: they fly away. Like most wildlife lovers, the animals I hold in such high esteem are simply terrified of me.
I once dragged a dead raccoon from the road and laid him in my parents' yard, hoping they would come. How can I explain this behavior without sounding unhinged?
I don’t want to pet them; I just want a good look at them. A good picture.
But why? What are we hunting for when we approach wild creatures, beyond photos, beyond meat, beyond another good view? What do we hope to take home?
Home
It’s hard to defend my enjoyment of an animal as aesthetically displeasing as a turkey vulture. With the head of a crushed walnut and the posture of a gargoyle, looming in dead ash trees and eating roadkill, they aren’t exactly the Disney standard for cuteness.
But growing up outside of a village in rural Ohio, whose population is still a whopping 2,000, there is not much else to do besides stare out the window. My family lives on a beautiful hill overlooking fields, a cliched midwestern barn, a heart-shaped pond, and one of the largest stands of privately-owned white pines in the county (an amazing record, I know). A woman of 90 years old, Grace, lived with her grandson in the house.
Staring out through my binoculars, I discovered that eight turkey vultures lived in the field. Specifically, on a dead cherry tree beside an old, abandoned corn crib on the edge of the field (the little brown shed near the middle of the photo).
On especially boring weekend mornings, I’d watch them warm their bodies, wings spread to the sun. We’d see a few drifting in figure eights above our house, huddled in towering pine trees, gliding on wind currents, the same ones that wafted wild mint, catfish, and field grass across the road: the smells of summer.
Those same vultures had been migrating back to this same field for over a decade, now. Maybe longer. Flying hundreds of miles south each November, to God only knows where (maybe Kentucky), they returned, of all the trees in North America, to this tree. To this dead cherry in this old field, middle of nowhere.
Loss
I had just returned from my first trip out of America, and was driving downhill toward our house with the windows down. Cold, sharp air. Gray, December day. Slowing down, I looked out at the old valley.
What used to be a field had fallen into a wasteland of bulldozer tracks, mud, and broken limbs. The long line of towering pines had crumbled. Dragged to the road. The smallest had been disregarded in the mud, their tops cut, branches mangled, piled up in heaps. The air reeked of diesel fuel and sawdust and dead things. Black smoke billowed from a burn-pile near the house. It was as if the Shire had turned into Isengard.
The forest was logged by a woman who had never even lived in it. She had never hunted deer in the field, walked its pine-needled paths, stood below the canopies. Never knew any of the inhabitants she had, intentionally or not, sentenced to death. She was Grace’s daughter, who had passed away the year before, and had come from out of state. Whether she needed the money was irrelevant to me at the time, and, to be frank, still is.
It snowed that evening. Sideways sleet, as though the sky itself were weeping. I walked down into the field to see the damage.
It was worse than I could’ve ever imagined. Every tree. Cut. Stripped. Sold. Or left to rot. A few trees were left that were too small to sell. I pushed on; I’d come looking for one tree in particular.
I found the vulture’s cherry tree cut in big chunks and tossed beside the corn crib, which had been crushed to pieces. Gone. The whole damn place. Just gone.
It was the first loss of a landscape I loved. If the loss was mine alone, it wouldn’t be as bad. I just visited this place. Other folks lived here. Deer, possums, raccoons, squirrels, hawks, mice, coyotes. The vultures had migrated to that very same cherry tree for as long as I can remember. It was for them, and for all the animals of this place that I cried, fretted over that winter.
Come Spring, where would they go?
Spring Comes
In mid-March of that year, I was driving up the same hill when I came upon a familiar sight: 8 birds circling over the field.
I stopped the car and got out. By then, three vultures had landed in one of the remaining pines. They sat there, unreadable, glowering like Sith lords. They’d stay. I knew, in that moment, that they would stay here until every pine would be cut and every rock would be covered, and every barn, crushed.
Against what it had felt like, the landscape hadn’t been killed. Just wounded. Severely wounded. But the return of these birds had, for me, served as the first step in its healing process. Soon, dogwoods, box elders, aspens, and buckthorn would sprout. But first, the vultures. Nature’s janitors are also nature’s first responders.
These birds contain vast swaths of my childhood, the history of this valley, the story of its wreckage, and its renewal. I want to feel the drama of those stories — smell the old pines again, listen, eyes closed, to a woodpecker thrumming into sap. I want to hold on.
So, I want to get close to them. To the stories and wisdom, these select creatures embody that no one else in the whole world ever could.
We can’t hold it in our hands. Can’t capture it. Can’t read every page of their book. Even if I got close enough to reach out and touch one their red heads, I know I wouldn’t do it. As much as I love those birds, they still gross me out. I’d probably just take their picture, walk back home, and write about them instead.
