Life on a Slight Dihedral

Juvenile humor, comfort, and wobbling whismsy

In October and November, the turkey vultures cruise back through my town on their fall migration in great kettles of hundreds of birds. They seem to be a subset of the greater migration that travels through the Mojave in the tens of thousands. I only see them once or twice, but then again, they are strangely easy to miss.

They usually see me first, dropping to tree level to investigate my activities in the front yard with a lazy curiosity. The silent spies eventually give themselves away with a single whooshing sweep of overlarge wings or a gigantic raptorial shadow that startles my attention upward. For a moment, the primeval part of my mind calculates fight or flight. Then I find myself looking into a featherless pink face with inquisitive glossy brown eyes. There is always a tilt of its head as it tries to get a better look, as if like me, it is now admiring and wondering what this fascinating creature is thinking. I always wonder how long they’ve been there, watching.

It confounds me why they find me so interesting, but I know why I feel that way about them. Their wrinkled bald heads extending into a powerful beak are startling and have inspired many a movie monster. Yet, that featherless skull serves them well, making it easier to keep their faces clean and free of bacteria. (Which is necessary if you are going to insert your whole head in a carcass.)

Turkey vultures also have disconcerting habits such as defecating on their bare, scaled legs to cool down and vomiting half-digested carrion as a means of escaping predators. They don’t seem to be the sort of animal you would want to spend much time with and yet they are always surrounded by friends. The truth is they are playful, smart, and social.

What I love most about the turkey vulture migration, however, is how people react to them. These low-flying dense flocks of vultures seem to go unnoticed by most despite their twice annual appearances. In years past, I was bombarded on Facebook, being tagged in local groups as people worried that there were great flocks of eagles with six-foot wingspans in their yard and warning others to lock up all the pets. If you don’t know turkey vultures, it’s a fair concern. And every fall and spring, I promised others that our vultures have giant harmless chicken feet. Then I shared their disgusting but somehow cool characteristics like a gleeful 12-year-old. Maybe we all have a gleeful 12-year-old inside because this year, I saw someone cheerfully announcing their arrival in neighborhood group.  

I think that it is one of nature’s greatest gifts that there are still things for all of us to newly discover. I must admit, I am jealous of those who have yet to look up at just the right time and find themselves beneath a vulture-stirred sky. It is a true moment of awe no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, but there is nothing like that initial surprise.

The first time I saw the migrating flocks 20 years ago, the world felt so big at that moment, and I wondered how much was still hidden from me. And when I paused to take in the sky for a while, I saw an endless pattern tightening, disintegrating, stretching through seasons and time. It was comforting, not in its majesty, but in its wobbling whimsy.

I keep hoping that the weather in the Pacific Northwest has pushed down one last wave of the migration. Perhaps a few flocks of vultures have dawdled. It seems too late in the fall now for this, but I keep looking up just in case.