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.

I read, the are bigger than the western Condors?

The black vultures have really increased in number here in NE AL over the last several years. They are very aggressive, especially in comparison to the turkey vultures. Earlier this year a large group of black vultures with a few turkey vultures perched around one of my water troughs and wouldn't let cattle and goats get to it. The black vultures would open their wings when cattle or goats would come toward the water and swoop at the stock if they came forward. I had to persuaded them to leave.

I'm assuming it was the same group that killed a calf born at my father's a 1/2 mile away. Worried it to death and pecked the eyes out. Lot of stress on the mother as well.

I think protections should be lifted on the black vultures in any case where they are a nuisance.

You can get a permit to kill vultures if they are attacking livestock. But you have a hard burden of proof before they will issue one.

I don't think that's so.

Where do you find enough dead democrats to feed 20k buzzards?

I suppose if a rancher is checking his cattle and finds vultures trying to kill a $1000 calf, he applies for a permit to kill a vulture, after the permit arrives months later.
“Cmon man”

I'll assume they nest in spring, I don't know where the do nest however?

That's the point. The treaty needs to be repealed. If you've been paying attention, I believe Cormorants were listed on that treated as well...Ontario is now putting an open season on them.

Hopefully hawks and eagles follow suit

Our congress has a habit of passing emotional environment laws that can't be repealed even long after they've served their purpose and are now detrimental. Think feral horses and marine mammals.

Cormorants are a problem here too.

Around here, they are just ugly birds, they clean up dead stuff.

That's right.

Politics and emotions have NO place in proper wildlife management or management of invasive species.

But sadly, that's about all that the above is based on.

Make 'em?

I thought lead bullets were killing all of them?

Right, after the wolves, sea lions, buzzards, feral horses and donkeys, cormorants, racoons, get enough to eat I'm guessing we won't have much left.

I've seen Turkey Buzzards in Bluegrass area of Ky. all my life, but no Blackheaded Vultures till just a few years ago. A lot of folks thought they'd been transplanted, & like myself, didn't know they were native to the state as no-one had ever seen one here.

Cattlemen hate them & quite a few got taken care of. Then The fish & game dept. stepped in to stop that. They do offer farmers permits at times for control around calving time. Unlike the Turkey Buzzards, who rarely if ever bother a living animal, the BHV have been seen pecking the eyes out of new born calves.

This.


When you guys get done with them down south send 'em back up next spring.

I don't see the red headed ones much down here anymore. Don't know why.

Re: the grey fox: I use to do a lot of crow shooting. One of my spots had a fox hole nearby. When they heard my electronic caller they'd come up out of the hole and start watching the sky for falling dead crows. I kept them well fed.

I don't mind the buzzards.

They let me know when I have a problem in the pasture, either with the cattle, or poaching, etc.

Kinda hard to fool those buzzards...

Don't know but we can start feeding them

Who says they have to be dead.

They smell bad enough.

My vet tells me the buzzards can eat anthrax dead animals , Democrats, perhaps vultures have some standards.

Turkey vultures weren't common here in the New Jersey suburbs 30 years ago. They became more common over the years, and then were followed by black vultures. Now I see them every day. I guess the increase on road traffic has given them more road kills to feed on. God knows there are way too many suburban deer, and they are killed daily on the roads.

I was driving on a road next to the Passaic River recently and saw a dead deer on the side of the road between the road and the river. There were at least 12 turkey vultures feasting on that dead deer. It reminded me of a scene from Africa.

In recent years we have had two road kill deer on my street. The first was in my back yard. My neighbor called the cops as it wasn't dead. I offered the cops my Ruger 10/22, but they used a 12 gauge. They dragged the carcass to the curb and covered it with a tarp. A few days later a truck came to pick it up. The truck was a dual real wheel stake body with a power lift gate. It had at least 15 dead deer on it. More recently a fawn was killed in front of my next door neighbor's house. I wonder how many other residents of my town are having the same experience. We have way too many deer in the NJ suburbs.

Bears are seen here as well. My friend who lives about a mile away had a sow bear with cub in his yard. So, the bears are not only moving into the suburbs but are breeding here. Our leftist governor wants to shut down the bear hunt next year. I have seen two road kill bears in recent years.

We have a lot around here. More some years than others. I have never seen them to be predatory; certainly not to the extent that ravens can be. They get on a dead deer or elk pretty quickly but I've seen quite few domestic cattle carcasses which just lay there and were untouched by vultures or ravens or anything else. I've seen them on a dead newborn calf but it seemed likely the calf was dead before they touched it.
I have seen ravens wipe out a hatch of grouse chicks but have not seen vultures even try. I have seen ravens trying to cut out a turkey chick but again, never seen a vulture act in a predatory way at all. GD

We have both here all year long. A farmer friend of mine (now deceased) used to tell anyone that hunted on his farm tto shoot any buzzard they could. He had some buzzard traps that had a wire funnel leading to a wire enclosure. If a cow died he’d drag it in there and before your know it would be full of buzzards.
He lost many calves to them even as they were being born.

Black vultures are horrible around stock, if I had stock I’d shoot every one of them hanging around, with a high zoot air rifle if noise was a problem.

It ain’t like they are endangered, their breeding range extends clear down to Southern Argentina.

They mate for life and actually run in packs of related birds, when one drops down from the sky they all home in on that spot, they can even communicate carrion info at the roost site and follow the bird that knows where the next day.

My sister has 60 sheep on 20 acres in NY State, heritage breeds, sells to the specialty wool and meat market in Dutchess County. This past August when I was up there a group of Black Vultures landed in the brush behind her barn, prob’ly had nested back there.

She has a good heeler/Aussie mix that helps her with the sheep but I’d bet she’s gonna come out one day and find a mutilated lamb, live or dead.

That’s because all you have is TVs, which are fairly benign, Black vultures, not so much.

If you’re too far north for black vultures, likely you don’t have a problem.

Feast or famine for vultures, they’ve not fed captive birds for two weeks at a time with little apparent effect, turns out based on your observation they can gorge big time when they get the opportunity.

Roadkill and warm-period climate. Actually, studies have shown that in rural areas they eat more livestock and poultry farm offal than they do roadkill, maybe there’s more such big operations in NY now than there was.

I stepped outside today. The wind was blowing about 20 mph and there were four vultures in the air. It's amazing how they can hold their own against the wind and navigate without flapping their wings hardly ever.

Rendering plants have increased prices a lot! That may leave a lot of dead animals left for the buzzards?

Thousands show up in Miami every winter. Then suddenly, in the Spring, they are gone.

Plenty around here, along with Blacks. I read that the TVs are better at finding stuff to eat, but the BVs have stronger beaks and are better at getting into the carcasses.

A dead critter lying around here will attract both varieties of vulture, red-tailed hawks, and bald eagles. There’s a definite pecking (no pun intended) order at the buffet. I’ve seen vultures waiting while both the hawks and eagles fed. The eagles I get, but it looks pretty silly for the big-ass vultures, and not just one, to be waiting on a little red-tail to finish its meal.

Some years back, the vultures were a huge problem in the Frederick, MD area. They ate anything made of rubber, like boat covers, AC hoses, etc, and pooped all over everything. Homeowners installed spikes on their roof peaks to prevent them from roosting. I read at least one newspaper story about a farmer getting a permit to shoot the ones killing his ducks. Eventually, I think they moved off, but nearby Leesburg, VA had a smaller problem after that.

Somewhere between 3 and 5 dozen roost in the neighbors trees each night all summer long. I do my best to feed them with dead rock chucks........

On a cold morning they will line up on a chain link fence with their wings half opened up soaking up the sunshine. They are a bird best observed from a distance.

They certainly are furtive, perpetual-motion creatures aren’t they.

There has been an explosion in turkey vultures up here including all the big raptors up to Bald Eagles. I attribute it to the almost exponential increase in livestock confinement’s and the inevitable several deceased corpses’ piled outside.

It’s a veritable buffet for those birds and coyotes. Bald eagles aren’t quite so regal perched atop a hog carcass. 😉

Birdwatcher, so thats why I saw so many this weekend. I popped a couple of hogs in the mornings and they were on them quick.

left some pizza on the counter, came back later and the buzzards had got it.

We call the black headed vultures mexican buzzards and they're not welcome around here. If you harass buzzards on their roost they'll leave after 2 days and not come back for a year sometimes two. SSS