Vultures all the way down – The Boston Globe

From the place I now sit south of the Mason-Dixon line, I’ve breaking information for my fellow New Englanders: the vultures are coming.

I imply that actually. Precise vultures — turkey vultures — are flying north as rightful and imperfect harbingers of spring.

From my residence in Vermont, I launched into a street journey to the southeastern United States to satisfy the spring in all its manifestations: heat, wildflowers, songbirds, baseball.

By the point I reached Philadelphia, the purple maples had been blooming alongside I-95. At a roadside relaxation space in North Carolina, the season’s first butterflies had been on the wing. And all through my route, it has been turkey vultures all the best way down. They drift at low altitude, holding their wings in a slight dihedral and teetering gently backward and forward, their bare, ruddy heads searching for out the useless.

For at the least 50 years turkey vultures have been increasing their vary and numbers into New England, different parts of the northern United States, and southern Canada. We’re not totally positive why, however extra roads and extra automobiles, and due to this fact extra roadkill, may clarify a part of it.

Regardless of the case, I’m OK with extra vultures, which have some uncommon and fantastic variations in contrast with different birds. One is an acute sense of scent, which permits them to search out carrion in any other case hidden within the woods. We suspect vulture pairs stay monogamous and mate for all times, not like plenty of different birds. And vultures reportedly defend themselves from predators by vomiting at will (not that any of us would care to check this).

One morning, whereas birdwatching in North Carolina, I ended up chatting for almost an hour with an 80-year-old marine veteran who had seen lots of the world. He advised me that the ospreys would return right here any day to nest (they did), and I identified an orange-crowned warbler feeding close by in a yaupon holly, which I child you not goes by the scientific identify Ilex vomitoria. We mentioned army corruption and the horrors of warfare. And we talked about children and households, getting previous, and marriages that didn’t final.

When it was time for breakfast, we smiled and bid one another properly. As I walked a park street again towards my campsite, he handed me with a wave and a toot from his beater, a blue-and-white Chevy pickup sporting a Trump-Pence bumper sticker on its again windshield.

Had my very own opposite politics come up throughout our dialog, I think it wouldn’t have mattered a lot. Not that I’m naive in regards to the coarseness of our tradition and public discourse or the dismal destiny of nature. It is likely to be straightforward for me on this journey to see the turkey vultures circling over a nation and planet in decline.

However the purple maples bloom right here in purple states as properly. Spring is coming. And it’s arduous to argue politics with anybody when warblers and ospreys are on the wing. And even vultures.

Bryan Pfeiffer is a semi-retired subject biologist and lecturer on the College of Vermont. He writes Chasing Nature on Substack and lives in Montpelier.