An invasion of vultures
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, June 1, 2005
WASHINGTON – Like some squadron of death, the flesh-eating birds circled down from an unremarkable sky one day in April, and no one in Breton Bay knew quite what to do.
In more than a decade in the southern Maryland neighborhood, Elaine Kramer had seen nothing like it: dozens of black vultures perched on rooftops and decks, all hunched shoulders and bald skulls. “Like a dive-bombing sequence,” she said, they strafed her house with droppings. For weeks their hooked beaks tore caulking off her roof; their stomping could be heard through the ceiling.
When she pulled out of the garage, they were right there on the ledge, beady-eyed stares boring through her windshield. At one point, Kramer, St. Mary’s County’s finance director, stood in her driveway with her car door open, ready to jump in, and hurled tennis balls. The vultures were unfazed.
“It was incredible. When you look up and see 26 vultures lined up on the peak of your roof and some of them are sort of strutting around, it’s pretty disconcerting,” said Kramer. “Hopefully it’s not some seasonal migration pattern that we’re going to have to get used to.”
It very well might be. While a precise head count is not available, experts say the numbers of turkey and black vultures – the Northeast’s two species – have been booming in recent years. They are most noticeable when they congregate to roost before dispersing to breed.
On the march
Across North America, the number of turkey vultures roughly doubled between 1980 and 2000, while black vulture populations increased more than fourfold, according to federal officials. Once based primarily in Central America and the gulf states, vultures are on a colonizing march into the Northeast: Maryland and Virginia now have the highest relative abundance of black vultures among 13 Eastern states.
Last year, the Audubon Society’s Christmas bird count – just a portion of what’s out there – recorded 14,955 black and turkey vultures in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., up from 7,332 two decades earlier.
Humans have in effect encouraged the vulture expansion with refuse and land clearing, biologists and federal officials said. As people have pushed new roads and houses farther into the countryside, they’ve brought more roadkill and landfills to feed the vultures.
“The more land clearing you do, the better it is for vultures. It makes it easier to find food,” said Martin Lowney, Virginia director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife services program, which responds to the growing number of complaints of damage caused by vultures. “They’re going to keep increasing at a fast rate.”
Majestic fliers with a wingspan up to six feet, vultures have become notorious on farms, at marinas and on suburban streets. The turkey vulture prefers carrion, but the more aggressive black vulture will kill newborn calves, sheep or pigs. They can tear windshield wipers off cars and shred vinyl seats on boats; officials say that two dogs in Virginia have died of botulism from eating vulture vomit.
“This is not going away,” said Bryan Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary. “And what’s clear, I think, is the conflict will continue to intensify until a resolution is forced.”
Finding that resolution has been difficult. Vultures are federally protected under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, though officials can issue permits to kill them. From 2000 to 2003, the number of vultures legally killed in Virginia rose from 142 to 450; in Maryland, from 2 to 20, according to a recent Agriculture Department report. Environmentalists have criticized the killings. The birds don’t breed until they are 8 years old and lay only two eggs per year, Watts said.
“That’s a pretty low reproductive rate,” he said “You have to be careful how many you’re taking.”
Vulture harassment
Nonlethal harassment techniques are preferred by both environmentalists and wildlife officials. In Radford, Va., no effort has been spared to roust about 1,400 birds that have settled in the pine trees. Authorities sprayed them with water, exploded fireworks and chopped down some trees. A research team from Florida has come to experiment with other scare tactics: shining lasers at the birds and hanging dead vultures in their trees. Often these techniques are only temporarily effective or merely push vultures a short distance away.
“At some point, you’ve got to say enough is enough,” Lowney said.
That point was reached at Dutch Gap, south of Richmond, where vultures had been causing $5,000 to $10,000 in damage to cars and boats every weekend in the spring and summer since 1999, he said. Authorities used a huge walk-in trap, baited with chicken carcasses, that in an hour would cage about 50 vultures.
“We’ve removed a little over 700 vultures and there are still about 250 there,” Lowney said.
Still, vultures do have their champions. The prospect of being eaten by one struck poet Robinson Jeffers as an act of transcendence. He wrote, in “Vulture”: “To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes – What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment, what a life after death.”
Robert Sheehy, a biologist at Radford University whose students study vultures’ feeding habits, said Radford should view the birds as a tourist attraction instead of villains: “I don’t think the vultures are doing any harm, and a tremendous amount of energy is being spent on getting rid of them.”
Washington Post photo
A turkey vulture makes itself at home on Elaine Kramer’s porch in Leonardtown, Md.
