Dinner is Served: A Vulture's View of History

Black vultures sunning on Buffalo Mountain. All photos by the author

A black speck circles 800 feet above our woods and almost a quarter mile away. Without the binoculars, I can tell by its flap-flap-glide flight, by the outline of its wings, that my bird is a vulture. Coming closer, the lenses confirm its head is not red. This one's featherless head is black. The species has some white on the underwings that helps identify them in the right light, but even their densely black feathers can mirror back the sunshine and fool you into thinking you see white where you just see reflected light.

And now there are three black vultures, circling several hundred feet apart, rising together in a common pool of warm air, just turbulent enough that each makes constant changes in the camber and pitch of each of its wings independently, adapting to the currents and just so, to maintain their heads and eyes as the constant while their bodies are gently nudged now and then by the winds. They are always attending to the ground below, even as they fly free-form, I am convinced, for amusement, for joy.

When they come low and close, the binoculars show that even the spread of their primary feathers on the trailing edge of the wings respond individually to the intermittent lift or drag of the air, fine-tuning the lazy spirals of their circumspection above this flat grassy field, where, from their altitude, they can see beyond the very edge of the great escarpment of the Blue Ridge that drops precipitously into Carolina.

Like so many before over the decades, I have projected myself into a single vulture in view this morning, have beamed myself up to see through his eyes, felt each primary on my wing twist and thrust, even perchance to know his incredible sense of smell--fine-tuned to the wonderful stench of the next meal. I, the bird, will follow the gradient of molecules, stronger and stronger, the closer dinner comes, when the time is right.

This is my new friend, Cassius.

My aspect is prehistoric. Some say there is something oddly sinister in my silent waiting for death. Despite my hideous demeanor and tolerance of putrefaction, there is greatness and nobility in my calling as the Great Equalizer over the millennia, to follow the Angel of --natural or unnatural--Death. I leave the bones of kings and cowboys alike to bleach in the sun. It is an environmental service the squeamish men below could not pay for or do themselves. I have done this work, around the globe, for eons.

The bark of a distant dog brings me back into my own bones and present moment, and I am observer again, considering the black bird, whose mind-space I have just left. I watch him gliding effortlessly in the circle of light--an individual, one of a kind. We will call him Cassius. He is a genetic manifestation from a discrete germ line, a species, one branch of related scavengers on the tree of life, of which Cassius, and the kind, is only the most recent twig. This bird had parents, who had parents--each bird surviving some 25 years. The origins of the species are ancient. Long lives of bird and kind must confer a kind of wisdom.

But what does vulture wisdom look like, I wonder, as I trace the spirographic curves of their carefree patterns overhead. What does Cassius, my soaring specimen think or know now that he did not know in year one out of the egg? Does each bird become a better feeder over time, a better parent, better mate? In their old age, do they become philosophical or irritable or addled and confused? At some point, do they forget the way home and not recognize their children?

My bird is not just a bird. Cassius, with his lean and hungry look, is a portal forward and backward in Bird Time. His cosmic memory knows what has been on the past menu of Coragyps atratus and perhaps can see ahead, from its venerable lineage, to that which is yet to be served by the spread of carrion we prepare hamfisted in our mishandling of our own behavior and its consequences sweeping across the planet. Cassius is the feathered NOW in a continuum looking back and ahead in bird lifetimes.

A thousand vulture generations ago, towards the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, black vultures would have been abundant in Central and South America, where they still make permanent homes, their range spreading north, especially over past decades as climate warms.

The mile-high wall of ice pushed all surviving animal populations south, compressed at high density into less forest and prairie and savannah than would support them. The black vultures were there, clearing the landscape of surplus mammal and rodent, bird and reptile species--dead animal kinds we've never seen or named, extinct for two million years before the naked apes razed forests and planted crops and settled down and watched Netflix in the stable Holocene.

A hundred vulture life-times ago, our black vulture's European kin witnessed the carnage of various plagues, in which humans succumbed to an invisible and mysterious killer (bubonic plague, black death, typhoid, and so many others) to which carrion feeders, thankfully, are not susceptible. So unburned bodies piled deep at the edge of town, feeding episodic booms in vulture populations. Out of death, life.

Cassius's great-grandparents, only a dozen generations removed, took part in the vast and decades-long feast that fell on their plates when our self-important species disregarded the long-term survival of any animal but its own kind, casually killing a 2000 pound bison to eat its tongue and leave the rest for the vultures, always circling gracefully overhead, sniffing, waiting, thinking deep thoughts.

Since we learned to wash our hands, cook our food and cover our mouths when we sneeze, there are far fewer human corpses for American black vulture’s banquet, but still an ample supply of human food in far too many places on Earth, even in our times, when the population has swollen more than 332 fold, from the million in around 1745 to 332 million in 2020.

While both the numbers and the footprint of American humankind have mushroomed, the number of former native animals that were so abundant here in 1745 has declined drastically--not just in numbers but in disappeared species and larger taxa. But we have more than made up for that extinct or extirpated biomass, to replace it with a feast of vulture-fare: Human-favored captive animals---chickens, pigs, cattle, dogs and cats--in their millions.

And oh yes! Then came Road Kill—an unexpected windfall Cassius’s grandparents’ grandparents had never imagined. Talk about your Fast Food Moveable Feast! All the animal kinds not felled by Big Timber or plowed down by Big Ag were now potential fodder for the Asphalt Food Court of human haste called Interstates. Eat well! But stay on the shoulders!

The Market Watch for vulture futures projects a rosy picture, as climate chaos creates an increasing and reliable abundance of carrion after wildfires and floods, mudslides, hurricanes and tornados. The prospectus is also promising for overlapping pandemics certain to come, where mortuaries and hospitals are overwhelmed by victims, unburied.

Finally, for dessert, the escalating displacement of beleaguered populations with terminal privation due to crop failure, famine and malignant social inequality that will surely contribute to the future welfare of my bird’s great-great-grandchildren, if not to the pantry of his own generation if humans insist, after all they’ve suffered, on business as usual. And the Big Wars of buzzard-lore yet to come insure an apocalyptic cornucopia-landscape of vulture victuals. It’s a great time to be a buzzard.

Cassius should be nothing but optimistic for his progeny. The far side of humanity's brief dominance of land and sea may come in no more than four vulture generations, the human experts are predicting now with increasing dismay but no longer, surprise.

And so I think my thoughts through the mind of my morning vulture, high overhead just now, scribing his lazy circles. From his thirty thousand foot view of life, the universe and everything, he seems to be smiling. His kind have capitalized on the inevitable--as sure a thing as exists on Earth. And life is good, and also death, for as far as he can see.