Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Scavenging Black Vulture
By: Tom Berg
Most people have seen the dark image of vultures slowly circling high overhead, either on TV or in their own personal lives. Sometimes they are circling over roads and sometimes over open farm land. Depending on where you live, these birds might be turkey vultures or they might be black vultures. Both species sport black feathers and a featherless head, but the black vultures have a black head – whereas the turkey vultures have a distinctive reddish head.
Black vultures have been expanding their range northward for many years now, but they are still a bird mostly of the southeastern United States. As mentioned, they are black from head to tail, but they do have some white on the underside of their wingtips. They have a strongly hooked beak like most raptors, and they are very large birds, too. With a wingspan of nearly five feet and a weight of more than four pounds, they are only slightly smaller than their cousins the turkey vultures.
Like most vulture species, black vultures are carrion eaters. That means they eat dead animals almost exclusively. Roadkill like deer, raccoon, opossum, squirrels, and almost any other animals that are killed by cars on our roadways are scavenged by black vultures. That makes them pretty helpful for keeping areas clean. They also eat dead livestock that they find in open farm country, like cattle, hogs, chickens and even horses. Dead wild animals found far from roads are also on their menu, including skunks, coyotes and almost anything else.
Black vultures usually find their food by flying high overhead and scanning the ground below for signs of dead animals. When turkey vultures are found in the same area, the black vultures will follow them since turkey vultures have a tremendous sense of smell and usually find rotting animals first. If enough black vultures descend on a carcass found by a turkey vulture, they can often drive off the turkey vulture (or vultures) and have the meal all to themselves.
An ending note: Black vultures don’t only eat carrion. They have been growing more bold in recent years, and often attack and kill newborn cattle and sheep on livestock farms. But that’s a story for another day.
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