Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 20,000 Turkey Vultures

Ballparking the total from the Corpus Christi HawkWatch today.

For once a major cold front came through on a weekend, strong north winds blew down scads of stuff, not just raptors.

Ordinarily I don’t get excited about vultures, but entire rivers and streams of them across the sky today, all day. Wasn’t squinting up at dots either, TV’s aren’t particularly high altitude birds, and they are so lightweight they can soar on almost anything.

Mixed in with the hoards were lots of Swainson’s hawks and northern harriers, species with wing loadings low enough they can hang with TV’s.

More than half a million broad-winged hawks counted over Corpus, mostly in late September. Several late juvenile broadies, these the birds that, just out of the nest, couldn’t make weight in time for the main push, they are prob’ly gonna have a rough time of it.

Afterwards I stopped in to see Roger, got to pet George. If you haven’t been up close and personal with a live grey fox you have no idea what they are like. More like one third fox, one third weasel and one third cat, as Rog said not like a dog at all, more like a cat.

There was a grey fox that hung around a factory where I worked night shift. We would sit outside around some picnik tables at night during breaks and the fox would come up to get snacks from us. He wouldn't come right up to us. He would stop about 15' away and wait for us to toss him stuff to eat.

Management got all worried about it and set a box trap out to catch him. I don't know why. They were typical factory management control freaks.

One night everybody was leaving. Actually it wasn't night. We got off at 3 AM. One guy wrote "Fug you, signed The Fox" on an index card and left it in the box trap on his way out.

I don't know if they ever caught him. But he stopped coming around.

Birdie,

where do those vultures end up, do you know.

We saw a bunch around the town of San Ignacio in Baja in '97 or so. Seems the roost in the palms there around the springs. Go out to the lagoon to feed, saw them out there every day once we got out there. I would assume they are mostly West Coast birds though.

Looked like a horror movie setting every morning and evening with thousands coming in to roost or leaving.

Sounds very cool, Birdie.

The hunt club I was in for a few years west of Waycross Georgia has a thousand or more vultures that winter in it. I shot a doe one morning across the creek. Since I was going to have to walk back through another members stand to retrieve the deer I let it be for about an hour. By the time I got to the deer the vultures had eaten three quarters of the deer. On cold a nights the vultures will huddle together on the ground in groups of over a hundred in protected small clearings. I walked into a bunch in the dark once and it was crazy with all the vultures beating wings to get up. They don’t all run for the border.

Live near a gravel pit. Theres a few around, all the time.

I looked it up on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology subscriber website “Birds of the World”.

The ones that leave the US in winter are mostly the northern and western populations. Indeed you could see the local vultures all day long, plainly not joining the migrating hordes which do not feed on migration.

They migrate to Guatemala and points south, lots in Venezuela and Colombia with a whole bunch wintering over the Amazon.

just courious about TV,there seems to be alot more of them than I remember as a yute.
Why or is there a change to the numbers? Ugly bastids...

Yeah, there's a big number that stay year round here. But I'm seeing more black vultures, more and more.

Neighbor rancher had to run off a big bunch of vultures that were attacking a cow and newborn calf a few days ago. Mama cow was fighting them off, but there were too many.

Ain't no reason we can't legally shoot the damned things....same with Eagles hawks and owls

The US stopped using DDT 50 years or so ago. Raptors of all kinds have flourished.

Spiders, too... I can remember thinking about it when I saw a spider on our porch as a kid. Pffft...
Now I clean gobs of webs around every window or night time light source.

Well, other than the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — They’ll devour slimy newborn calves, full-grown ewes and lambs alive by pecking them to death.

First the eyes, then the tongue, then every last shred of flesh.

And there isn’t much defense against black vultures and turkey vultures, both of which are federally protected and cannot be killed without a permit.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 covers all migratory birds, their nests and their eggs, which means that the birds can’t be harmed without federal permission. Their nests can only be disrupted, as a deterrent, if there are no eggs or young in them.

But as the vultures, which are native to Kentucky, have multiplied in numbers nationally over the last two decades, they have become more of a problem for farmers. Each year, Kentucky farmers lose around $300,000 to $500,000 worth of livestock to these native vultures, according to Joe Cain, commodity division director for the Kentucky Farm Bureau.

It’s not just farm animals. Small pets may be at risk too.

https://apnews.com/article/e79711967910490db3368c1339545e47

Like White Pelicans, Buzzards must be expanding their range.
I clearly remember seeing my first turkey vulture on the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1988–then 3 more in 1990 and now they are a common sighting everywhere along the North Shore.
I found one dead on a gravel beach on Bonner Bay and examined it—don’t know how or why it died but it was fairly fresh. I was suprised at how light the bird was—they don’t weigh much—considering how big they look in the air

Went sent all of our turkey vultures south a couple weeks back. Sounds like they made it.

He have a preference for Sardines, or Vienna Sausages?

My uncle raised chickens. The "buzzards" would eat the chickens. So he nailed a board across a post about six feet high and put muskrat traps on the board. The buzzard (they were turkey vultures--no blacks in the North) landed on the horizontal board to check out the chickens. Trapped. Then he could beat the buzzards to death.

Like Scott said, I think ours have left. We see as many as twenty at a time. They get as far nor North as NW Ontario,

Saw about 30 on one road killed armadillo yesterday.

If ya saw one with a red head he came from here.