As many Springfielders know from observing it high overhead, the full-grown turkey vulture is a very large, mainly dark-colored bird- with a wingspread of up to six feet, second in wing extension only to the eagle among Ohio birds. Its weight, however, is no more than four to six pounds.
It is not a pretty bird up close, where it can be identified by its small, bald head, red beak and neck bare of feathers. But when gracefully sailing overhead at some distance from the observer, it is a beautiful sight indeed.
The turkey vulture to me, and to my next-door neighbor Chuck Mihal, is a welcome harbinger of spring.
Along with the appearance in our yards of the little blue flowers we call “squills,” the appearance of turkey vultures sailing overhead and roosting nightly in the Norway pines and sycamores near our houses has become our first clear sign that the deadly rule of winter is ending.
In recent years, Chuck and I have been in a competition to see who can spot the first vultures migrating to Springfield, probably from Texas, to grace us with their presence at least until early April.
This year we observed the first of these visitors on Feb. 14, about the same date as last year. But thereby hangs a tale.
According to Ohio ornithologist Bruce Peterjohn, the migration patterns of Ohio turkey vultures have been changing.
In “The Birds of Ohio,” published 2001, he wrote: “Migrant turkey vultures increased during the 1990s, and have shown a tendency to return earlier to Ohio in recent springs. The first migrants regularly appeared during the first half of March in the 1980s, but small numbers are now observed anywhere in the state by Feb. 15-25, except during severe winters.”
On my street, turkey vultures did not come to roost at all until about 2006, when they showed up in early March. Since then they have come earlier and in larger numbers, until now there are as many as 50 or 60 at the height of their migratory roosting in the neighborhood, a number that diminishes significantly in early April as the molting, mating and nesting seasons arrive.
Peterjohn’s words and my own amateur observations are confirmed by News-Sun naturalist Bill Felker, who on March 18 answered my email query as follows: “The buzzard patterns that I’ve been noticing recently have been quite different from those when I first began taking notes here in the 1980s. The turkey vultures that used to arrive around March 15 now get here in February or never leave.”
These migratory changes must cause some embarrassment to the folks in Hinckley, Ohio, one of six American sites with vulture festivals or events recognized by the Turkey Vulture Society of Oakland, Ky.
Since 1957, Hinckley Twp., south of Cleveland, has been touted as the first place in Ohio for migrating turkey vultures to appear and roost, on March 15, just as swallows return to Capistrano on March 19 or groundhog Phil emerges from his burrow in Punxsutawney, Pa., on Feb. 2.
According to various Cleveland Metropark websites, the turkey vultures’ exact date of arrival is still March 15, with that day’s first buzzard sighting announced by the Official Buzzard Spotter, empowered by his mantra, “No one spots a buzzard until the Official Buzzard Spotter spots one first!” (Cleveland Metroparks, Emerald Necklace, March 2008).
But these Metropark websites, alas, have yet to explain why the Hinckley buzzards, apparently unaffected by migratory change, are so much slower than other Ohio vultures to reach their traditional spring roosting sites.
Could it be that the Hinckley Official Buzzard Spotter, like Lady Justice, is blind, or has gradually been losing his eyesight over the years?
A substantial revision of the behavior of vultures came with experiments showing that contrary to Audubon’s view, they have a keen sense of smell, as the following quotation from the Turkey Vulture Society website reveals: “In one study by David Houston, turkey vultures quickly found (usually within a day) many chicken carcasses placed under the forest canopy, and some of these were even hidden from view with dried leaves.”
Further revealing vultures’ highly developed sense of smell, oil and gas companies have used them in the past and sometimes still use them to find gas leaks, indicated by the vultures’ circling an area above a gas line.
(Ethyl mercapton, a foul-smelling compound added by gas companies to natural gas, is also released by carrion, and thus attracts vultures.)
Paul W. Miller is a retired Wittenberg University English professor.
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