The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

March 28, 2023

A turkey vulture leans into the sky with wings tilting side to side in that practiced V of a Bali dancer.  The black scavengers recently arrived from wintering grounds in Mexico and even as far south as Panama.  To welcome them, Bisbee residents donned winged costumes, beat drums and played kazoos and ukeleles while carrying giant vulture puppets around Vista Park.  Only Bisbee would celebrate a naked-headed, projectile-vomiting (10 feet!), relisher of all things dead and rotten at roadside.

This one swings its huge olfactory bulb in my direction.  Maybe it caught a whiff of something ripe and unseen.  Although turkey vultures have fine eyesight, it’s their sense of smell they rely on.  They see rising odor as if it were a wavelength of color.  Like chartreuse.  The color of putrefaction.

Your eyes can deceive you.  But not your nose.  Not if you’re a turkey vulture.

I witnessed this once right here in the yard.  A few years ago, I was hiking upcanyon when I stumbled upon a dead mountain lion.  Vultures had already picked it over and not much more remained than a desiccated hide and bones.  I managed to pry its head from its spine and carry it home, intending to clean it up for my bookshelf.  My good friend, birder extraordinaire Chuck LaRue, had taught me a simple method for doing this involving only water and time.  For over a month, the lion head soaked in the covered bucket while the bacteria did their work.  At the end, I retrieved a gleaming white skull and dumped the oily brown liquid under a tree.

In less than half an hour, three turkey vultures were walking on the ground next to the wet spot and looking at the grass.  Their dark, beady eyes seemed to say: “Something around here smells really good, but I just can’t seem to find it.”

Turkey vultures are so good at sniffing out carrion, black vultures and ravens will follow them—an astounding ability even John James Audubon got wrong.  Because of his abysmal experiments with turkey vultures using stuffed deerskins and pig carcasses, I grew up believing birds had a poor sense of smell, this “textbook wisdom” stemming from the 1820s and the name synonymous with American ornithology.

 Audubon should have tried putrid lion soup.

Thanks for subscribing. Here are this week’s new arrivals as migration amps up:

The season’s first Hepatic Tanager, a male.

Cassin’s Vireo

Plumbeous Vireo

Two nights ago, the first Elf Owl arrived at his usual nesting site at the power pole and began announcing himself to the canyon.