Driving home today along a country road, I witnessed a rare event: A vulture playing chicken with a falcon over a turkey carcass.
The vulture was a real vulture working a real turkey carcass near the edge of the road, stopping only to face down an oncoming car, which turned out to be an older Ford Falcon.
A fowl coincidence, nonetheless. I’d say it gave me goosebumps, but that wouldn’t be true.
The Falcon won, as the vulture grudgingly flapped off for a few seconds, before circling back to its meal.
The vulture image comes from this site, which has an interesting tidbit about vulture olfaction: “They are one of only a few birds to have a highly developed sense of smell, which plays a major role in locating food. Their sense of smell has also been used by engineers, who placed ethyl mercaptan (the odorous chemical in carrion) in gas pipelines to discover leaks. Leaks along a 42-mile long pipeline were immediately located by observing turkey vultures circling above them.”
Seems a wonder we don’t see these perceptive birds in flocks over Washington D.C.? Given all of the brain carrion and rotten humanity accumulating there, should be quite a stench? Perhaps professional courtesy is being observed – one vulture to another?