That's awsome Ingrid! He's so large. You are right. Now that you mention it, I haven't seen one in years. Glad your husband took the photos. Thanks for sharing them. Lisa

WOW! We don't see them here (we see Turkey Buzzards . . . ) so this is a real treat.

I'm assuming that is a juvenile turkey vulture (aka turkey buzzard). They have a black head for their first year or two, then the head turns red. Probably why he is hanging out in a relatively odd spot -- doesn't know any better yet!

A raccoon got road-killed in front of the house we were renting in Sunol about 15 years ago. It attracted quite a crowd of TVs (a dozen or so), who sat decorously in a queue on top of the white picket fence beside the road, waiting for a turn at the carcass. They did this for at least two days and it was quite a sight -- stopped traffic (didn't take much, in that town...). Our landlady also had one of those fountains in the front yard that included a statue of a girl and we got a photo of a vulture daintily perched and waiting on top of the statue's head. I've got to go dig out those photos some day!

Great shot! I remember as kids laying very still on the hilltops hoping we could get the turkey vultures to think we were dead. I guess we didn't smell ripe enough as it never worked. :)

Yep, you weren't dead enough, Anne. :-) Vultures are tuned into the sulfur compounds of decomposition. PG&E taints natural gas with mercaptan, the sulfur compound that gives otherwise odorless natural gas that nasty smell so that leaks can be detected. Thus, turkey vultures can actually be used to detect gas leaks, as they are attracted to them.

My husband found the photos from Sunol. We lived right on the main drag (such as it was) -- that's the elementary school across the street. Here's my favorite (adult TV here):

I had to read up on this a little bit and indeed turkey buzzards and turkey vultures are the same, buzzard just being another name for vulture, and this particular one is the most widely spread of all vultures in North America. I think they're rather endearing creatures, although not everyone might agree.

catspa, I love your story and that great picture!

Sometimes they perch on our tree in the morning and spread their wings out to warm up. It's magnificent how large their wingspan is. Well, lately it's been warm in the mornings but with the heat wave, some critters can't survive and so you see the gatherings of buzzards in the air. How those things smell like a meal to them.......

Is this a turkey vulture or a black vulture?

Our european vultures look similar but are supposedly unrelated. The vultures over here find their food based strictly on sight.

In California, Turkey Vultures are more likely, and the head looks TV-ish. We get both Black Vultures and Turkey Vultures here; they are not so gorgeous up close, but I love to watch them soaring on thermals...

They like a high perch to help them catch thermals, so if that boulder did the trick, you might see that bird again... maybe with a friend or two.

It would be cool to see a California Condor, but I guess not so likely.

Virginia

That is a trait that distinguishes the California condor from the turkey vulture here, Nik. The California condor scavenges by sight and thus mostly finds larger dead animals: deer, wild pigs, sea lions and seals, etc.). Turkey vultures, on the other hand, find their food by smell and more easily find smaller dead animals, along with the large. They have thus gotten more advantage from modern-day automobiles and road-kill than the condors, who are relicts of the Pleistocene megafauna age.

It is actually not too difficult to see California condors at Pinnacles National Monument, Virginia, if you are ever "going by" there and the day is a warm one with good thermals. They have number tags attached to their wings, so you know who is who.

Love your buzzard pic. The turkey vultures, bald eagles, and golden eagles like to hang out above our chicken coops in the tall pines and eyeball the chickens and get them clucking up a storm lol. They are fun to watch.

Thanks, catspa- Pinnacles is out of my way, but if I head west someday, it would be cool to visit. Their condor program is pretty nifty.

Black vultures also have a poor sense of smell; one way they remedy this is by hanging out with the Turkey Vultures, and tagging along when prey is scented...

Virginia

I think it's so amazing that turkey vultures can actually smell something dead from the sky! Imagine having a sniffer like that, crazy.

Great picture, Catspa. I'm glad you found it.

Anne, we did exactly the same thing as kids. I think if they actually had come down to feast on us, we would have been scared wittess:)

Should it make anyone feel better the turkey vultures are still doing very well here. There is a tree behind me that plays host to 38 of them each spring and fall. Amazing the tree can hold all of them it's not that large. Not a good photo but one that has stayed this year is eating atop a dead tree.

I would love to hear your vulture story, Comtesse, in an exotic place no less!

Oh my goodness, 8 likes! (I thought I'd do it if there were 5 or more..) There's not a lot to it, but don't read it if you're squeamish.

Newly married, my now ex and I were at Agra Fort on the Yamuna river, taking time out to view the Taj Mahal several miles downstream, where it appeared to hover on the distant riverbank like an impossibly lovely white waterbird.

We'd already visited it the day before, staying from mid-morning to closing time to gaze in fascination at its ever-changing shades of white as the sun moved round, to admire the magnificent marble work from elaborately carved perforated screens to exquisitely detailed, naturalistic relief carvings of flowers, and to observe the interesting optical illusion in the design of the minarets we'd been told about, which I'd wanted to see for myself.

So after viewing the Fort, we'd wandered down to the riverbank to take in yet another view of the Taj, with a tragic love story in mind. After the untimely death of his beloved wife, the grief-stricken Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan had commissioned the building, the artistic masterpiece of his reign, to house her tomb, and as an eternal monument to her beauty of body and spirit. But, before long he would be prevented from visiting her there, when his usurping son saw fit to ensure his hold on power by imprisoning his father for life at Agra Fort. For the rest of his life, the still grieving Shah Jahan could only gaze from afar, every day from his cell window, at his dear wife's wonderful tomb by the river.

Entranced with the beauty and the romantic history, I gazed out across the sluggish river and was surprised to see a large vulture silhouetted against the setting sun, floating slowly downstream, perched aboard a shiny black log-shaped floating platform. As I watched, he appeared to be picking and pulling at something near his feet, eventually hoisting up a quantity of black rubber tubing. As he feasted, my eyes adjusted; the floating log became distinctly less log-like and... with a shock, revealed itself to be a blackened human corpse, whose intestines he'd been busily removing...

I learnt later that they burn the dead at sacred sites further upriver, and sometimes apparently the corpses, or bits of them, can end up, half-burned, floating in the river. (I hope that is what happened, better than if some unfortunate lonely traveller had fallen in and drowned. Or the body of an anonymous beggar no-one cared about was disposed of into the river with the garbage, without a funeral rite...)

It's a striking aspect of India; its capacity to veer suddenly from transcendental beauty one moment to abject horror, at least to Western eyes, the next. And its people's apparent ability to accept and embrace that whole spectrum of life's highs and lows with remarkable equanimity and cheerfulness. Unless they're cocooned away from it all in their international 5-star hotels, Western visitors to India seem to either love the place passionately or hate it and can't wait to get away. I confess to being one of the former.

What a story, I enjoyed reading it and hope I don't dream of vultures tonight.

When the weather is perfect many times I'll throw a cushion on the deck. Enjoying a lovely outdoor nap. I do caution the vultures that I'm gone yet so no funny business.

A couple of links for anyone who's interested:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZy25C1qo4Y

for more about the story of the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan and his favourite wife - safe viewing; no nasties, just a beautiful love-and-architecture story from National Geographic..

www.birdlife.org/asia/news/first-signs-recovery-asia's-critically-endangered-vultures

for more on India's vultures and some recent challenges to their survival (click on the first item in the Search Results - for some reason the link's not going straight there).

I only saw vultures once in India. Quite a few of them had congregated by the side of the road and were feasting on I don't know what, and I remember they were a light or white color. Quite an interesting and, to me, exotic spectacle.

I also saw a group of them congregating near a tiny railway track, when we were going up to Simla in the Himalayan foothills, I think, and maybe once or twice in other places - it was a long time ago (early 1980s), so memories are a little hazy now. To my English eyes they seemed absolutely enormous, mostly blueish-black or black and white as far as I can remember, and really impressive but also definitely kind of ominous looking. (Maybe some kind of cultural memory...)

But there was also, paradoxically, something slightly comical and, yes, even endearing and genuinely admirable about them, once you got over the business of them eating humans... albatrosses appeal to me in a similar way, for some reason, although I've never seen them 'in the flesh'...

May I ask when and where you were in India?

comtesse, Simla is also one of my memories, as I spent my honeymoon there. My most vivid memory is seeing monkeys in pine trees, not a combination one usually thinks of. Of the four months I was there I stayed mostly in the Punjab, but also New Dehli, visited the Taj Mahal (unforgettable), botanical and rose gardens in several cities, and one or two other hill stations. This was some decades ago, and I never had a wish to go back because in that length of time I saw much more than just the tourist sites, and I was made keenly aware that so much of the world is living in conditions which makes what we enjoy almost unique, and in a way unreal. Now there is the realization that the luxuries we take for granted have poisoned the world, for which everyone will have to pay the price.

What a coincidence, Ingrid, that we both spent a part of our honeymoons in Simla!

Yes, I remember the monkeys now - there were so many of them, sitting on the wall (?) and running around the main way where everyone promenades. My best Simla memory was my first sight of the Himalayas, so majestic and beautiful. They were so high above us, I'd at first assumed that sunlit band of silvery-white way up high in the sky was clouds. The worst was feeling cold all the time, because we hadn't thought to bring any warm clothes, and it was snowing...

You're so right in your comments about the tremendous inequality in material comforts between the richest and the poorest in our world, and of the terrible effects our great advances have had on our planet, along with the benefits.

A young man who was working in Delhi with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence gave us another perspective on the issue. He said he'd worked with the homeless/rough sleepers in both India and in wealthy Australia, and nowhere in India had he encountered the sort of soul-destroying despair experienced by some Australians who'd 'fallen through society's net'. In contrast, these poorest of the poor of India, who had absolutely nothing materially speaking, were in general quite happy and felt no internal conflict or shame in their situation. Maybe their circumstances might be difficult now, but in the next life all could be reversed if they lived a good life today. They had a larger spiritual perspective to sustain them, that was as natural as breathing. Of course such equanimity in the face of hardship is difficult for wealthy Westerners to get their heads around, it's in such marked contrast to our own endless pursuit of the external things in life. Perhaps something to think about, anyway.

Very wise words, comtesse, and definitely something to ponder. Our expectations so often make us unhappy, because they can never all be fulfilled. One difference I see in the poor and homeless here versus those in in India, is the alcohol and drug abuse and often mental illness that is characteristic of the ones here. No happiness or peace of mind to be found in that, ever.