New Jersey's turkey vultures are 'tornadoes' of death. They're also amazing.

Shari Stern’s turkey vultures follow her around, like dogs. The birds look so alike, sometimes Stern can’t tell them apart. Templeton and Virgil, the turkey vultures in question, experience no such trouble. Tame turkey vultures recognize their human caretakers, and show affection to the ones they like.

For turkey vultures, nibbling at the socks of their keepers is a favorite game.

“They will play with your shoelaces,” said Stern, education director at the Raptor Trust, a nonprofit group in Long Hill Township, Morris County, that runs education programs about hawks and rehabilitates injured birds. “They’re interested in our paintbrushes, tools and rakes. They want to play with the feeding bucket.” 

As the turkey-vulture-to-human relationship grows more tenuous, wise humans learn to watch out. A captive vulture named Vinnie employs a stern face every time a human he doesn’t recognize enters his pen at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

“Vinnie is notorious for messing with our new interns,” Michelle Leighty, the museum’s wildlife manager, said of the 28-year-old vulture. “He follows them around, giving them a weird look. I think he’s just having fun.”

In the wild, turkey vultures treat strangers with outlandish disdain. The birds are monogamous for life. As parents, they swap turns incubating eggs. After a chick is hatched, both parents spend eight weeks scouring the landscape for carrion, which they regurgitate for their young.

If anyone disturbs this ritual, adult turkey vultures flop over. Their feeding technique — plunging their heads into dead and rotting animals — bathes their bodies in a horrendous stench, which helps turkey vultures excel at playing dead.

Other times, a turkey vulture will projectile-vomit decayed body parts right into the interloper’s eyes.

“The smell is like a thousand rotting corpses,” Siobhan Casimano of Florida told The Palm Beach Post in August when 20 turkey vultures came to congregate around her backyard pool.

It’s hard for human minds to fathom an animal so smart, so affectionate and so repulsive. Leviticus 11:13 describes the turkey vulture as “an abomination among the birds.”

This is the same species as Gandalf, Vinnie’s vulture friend in Cleveland. Gandalf eats worms by tugging them from Leighty’s hands, careful not to pinch her fingers in his pointy beak.

“They are the smartest birds by far, and the most fun to train,” Leighty said. “They’re really gentle.”

Turkey vultures remain as unknown to science as they do to Scripture. Charles Darwin described vultures as “disgusting” animals that “wallow in putridity.” Nearly two centuries later, scientists don’t understand why turkey vultures devour the vinyl seat cushions on boats. Why do they pluck masonry caulk from the skins of office buildings? Do turkey vultures teach their young to fly, or to sniff the wind for the smell of death?

Nobody knows. Scientists may be as grossed out by turkey vultures as everybody else.

“People laughed at me for studying turkey vultures,” said Bill Lynch, a state wildlife biologist in Kentucky. “Even the other biologists snubbed their noses at me.”

Position players

This month, bird-watchers in the Northeast will attend the south migration. At the Palisades and at Scotts Mountain in the New Jersey Highlands, they will gather in pretty places to watch pretty birds. Many birders pray to spot a beautiful golden eagle, only a handful of which migrate along the Hudson River every fall, said Karl M. Soehnlein, who organizes volunteers for the annual New Jersey Hawk Count at State Line Lookout in Palisades Interstate Park.

As the peregrine falcon tucks its speckled wings into its deltoids for a hunting divebomb, the birders will swivel their telephoto lenses and coo.

“Peregrines are the rock stars,” said Christopher Souci, the Raptor Trust’s executive director, “where the poor vultures are the position players.”

Flying right beside the hawks and falcons will be some number of rumpled, putrid turkey vultures. How many migrate? How many winter in New Jersey’s cold?

Don’t ask the birders. They’re here for the hawks.

Turkey vultures “are ugly as sin,” Soehnlein said.

What follows is an ode. Humans get so easily enthralled by what’s rare and pretty. This tendency is natural. Yet it leaves so much beyond our notice. The whole world is a playground for turkey vultures, for the humble, revolting spectacular floating silently before our eyes.

'Tornadoes' of death

I work in an office tower on the backside of Garret Mountain. The newsroom’s windows encompass panoramic views of Paterson and the Passaic Valley, with a few hundred feet of drop down to the I-80 trench. I was standing by a friend’s desk the first time I noticed it, a shadow that seemed to linger just outside.

I wondered, “Why is a helicopter flying so low?” Then I paused, refocused. I saw the thing more clearly: a massive bird, hovering in the air. It seemed to look right at me. More likely, it had spotted its own reflection in the glass.

“They just love looking in mirrors,” Leighty said.

Years later, I went looking for turkey vultures. I met Virgil and Templeton, who hop around together in a comfortable pen at the Raptor Trust. An adult turkey vulture is huge. The finger feather tips stretch nearly 6 feet across, wider than a bald eagle. From afar their bodies appear lumpy and matted. But in person, Templeton showed his finery, with shiny black feathers streaked in auburn highlights.

The head is stop-sign red. It appears bald, but it’s not. In fact, the skin is wrinkly and covered in fine black fuzz. The nostrils are skeletal, exposed and truly ugly. They resemble gore holes on a hunting knife, though Stern insists they serve no such purpose. Aft of the nostrils, a turkey vulture’s eyes are chocolate brown. They appear wise, vulnerable.

“I personally like them a lot,” said Bernd Heinrich, an eminent biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Vermont whose books on ravens, bees and owls double as works of science and poetry. “If you look at turkey vultures up close, they’re especially beautiful. They have a very endearing look.”

Back in my office, I rarely see the entire bird. Instead, most turkey vultures flash by in a gray blur. They seem to enjoy buzzing office towers. Before I can tell anyone to look, they are gone. Are they rushing to feast on a newly dead deer? I never know.

“They’re like tornadoes,” Lauren Pharr, a forensics consultant and vulture expert, said during a recent TED Talk. “You blink, you’ll miss them.”

So I called some people who know turkey vultures. This proved harder than it sounds. Gary Graves, the world’s leading authority, is away on a research trip so remote he won’t be checking messages for weeks, according to a spokesman at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

The other people I found mostly treat turkey vultures as a side project. A wake of turkey vultures can reduce a human corpse to bare skeleton in five days, Pharr said. To process so much viscera so quickly, the guts of vultures can carry anthrax, botulism and bubonic plague, a biome of pestilence so powerful it would kill most organisms.

“It’s ludicrous what’s going on inside a turkey vulture,” said Andy Jones, science director at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

There’s only so much anthrax a property owner can abide. Turkey vultures are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, so they can’t be shot. Instead, some farmers scare them away with propane cannons. The Bird-B-Gone company of Irvine, California, sells a 10-foot row of stainless-steel spikes for as little as $34.40. The Bird Wailer MKIIIa comes with six speakers, 34 terrifying prerecorded sounds and an optional strobe light (prices available upon request at Birdbusters.com).

Turkey vultures also can be zapped. Richard Selzer owns Avian FlyAway, a company based in Rockwall, Texas. He argues that the most effective response to a turkey vulture infestation is a miniaturized electric cattle fence.

“We’re a little pricey, but we solve the problem permanently,” Selzer said. “If you’re a wealthy business owner and you look out your boardroom and there’s a vulture looking at you, that’s not what you desire.”

Ubiquitous, unseen

Last week I went looking for turkey vultures. Twice I drove to the top of Garret Mountain. Both days were sunny and windy, perfect for generating the updrafts and thermals that turkey vultures need to fly.

I saw none. Later, I drove to State Line Lookout. Half a dozen birders stood on the ledge. Their hands cradled expensive-looking binoculars and cameras, ready to track ospreys and goshawks. The worldwide turkey vulture population tops 18 million, but again I found none, a minor feat for such a common bird.

When the subject is turkey vultures, miracles always seem close at hand. Spiraling in the tornadic vortex of thermals, turkey vultures have been spotted by pilots 20,000 feet in the sky. At the top, they break off. They glide for miles till they reach the bottom of the next thermal, catching another elevator ride up.

In this manner, a turkey vulture covers hundreds of miles a day without a single wing flap.

“Puffy clouds usually sit at the top of a thermal,” Jones said, “so we think they look for those.”

A turkey vulture’s wide-open nostrils sync to an olfactory lobe in the brain that’s proportionally larger than that of any other bird. Among 11,000 avian species, turkey vultures possess the strongest sense of smell. They can detect infinitely tiny traces of death, down to a few parts of noxious gas per billion of air, then track the smell upstream to its source.

“The vulture is a champion smeller,” Jones said. “They can be very high up, and detect rising smells carried up on thermals, and follow that down.”

The turkey vulture’s miraculous abilities do nothing to improve its ugliness. Standing at State Line Lookout I finally spotted one, drifting on a northbound updraft. A turkey vulture in flight appears unstable, tilting across its longitudinal axis like a teeter-totter. Its bony head protruded from a mat of prickly black feathers.

The bird-watchers on the ledge did not move. Their cameras dangled limp from cords around their necks. At day’s end, they submitted their tally of birds. They had witnessed 16 American kestrels, three merlins and 51 sharp-shinned hawks.

The number of turkey vultures recorded was zero. 

Email: maag@northjersey.com

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