The Thing with Feathers (9 page)

Studies of turkey vultures’ sense of smell are complicated by
the fact that smell overlaps with taste, and even turkey vultures are fairly discriminating about what they eat. They prefer herbivores to carnivores, just as we do, which is why you’ll see vultures more often on a road-killed deer carcass than, say, a dog or cat. And they like their meat fresh.

Birds, like humans, can distinguish among sweet, sour, salty, and bitter foods, though the arrangement is slightly different. Their taste buds are located mostly on the interior of their beaks instead of on their tongues, and birds have vastly fewer receptors than people do; humans have about 9,000 taste buds, while birds have only a couple hundred. It’s unclear how the number of taste buds relates to actual perception (one species of catfish, for instance, has about 100,000), so we don’t really know how different birds experience taste. But because smell is so closely related to taste, it’s possible that vultures taste their food more intensely than other birds in the world—oh, the irony.

—

IN HIGH SCHOOL,
as my interest in birds was taking off, it took me more than a month to track down a worthy roadkill to lure my turkey vultures. By the time I found a good carcass, I’d nearly lost hope; all the turkey vultures would be gone in a few more weeks, and I wondered if I’d have to put off my photography adventure until the following summer.

But one afternoon when I wasn’t even particularly searching, there it was, pummeled and piled on the shoulder of the interstate on a hot August afternoon. A doe had wandered into freeway traffic to meet her unfortunate demise, and, in a circle-of-life kind of way, a new beginning. She looked crumpled, somehow smaller without the use of those spindly legs, and I nearly missed seeing the carcass at all.

I pulled over, popped the trunk, whipped out my gloves, and wrestled the deer off the ground—not an easy task for one skinny kid. Eighteen-wheelers whizzed past, blasting me with heat waves rising from the tarred pavement. The deer was fresh but already bloated with gas, carpeted in flies and yellowjackets, and it oozed a viscous fluid from a nasty shoulder injury. It smelled awful. I trusted the Hefty bags would contain the leak, dropped the carcass in the trunk, jumped in the driver’s seat, and headed out.

Even at 65 miles per hour, the overpowering stench could not be contained. It built to unbreathable proportions before I was halfway home, so I drove the rest of the way with my head hanging outside the window like an excited puppy, my emotions suddenly mixed. Was this really a good idea?

One thing that nobody—not Audubon, not Bachman, not Stager—ever mentioned in their scientific papers about vulture smell was, well, the
smell
. This doe of mine reeked to high heaven and beyond. The scent of decay is not subtle. I didn’t need to calculate a concentration threshold or gas distribution to confirm the obvious. My nose could easily sniff out this deer from hundreds of yards away.

At home, I’d already set up a camouflaged blind in an overgrown pasture behind my house where sunlight could illuminate the carcass. As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I transferred the deer to a waiting wheelbarrow and rushed it to the spot, dumping the body as if it had naturally been flattened there. Then I settled in to wait.

It didn’t take long, not even a few hours. Around dinnertime, a vulture glided in like a stealth bomber and landed in a tree at the edge of my backyard, flapping awkwardly as it perched on a high branch. Several more showed up over the next hour. I scooted out to my makeshift blind and sat next to the
stinking deer until the sun set, but none of the vultures ventured down to touch it. Disappointed, I retreated to the house and went to bed.

The next morning, a creepy sight greeted my family outside the kitchen window: Nearly twenty turkey vultures were hunched on top of telephone poles, rooftops, and tree branches around the yard, evidently having spent the previous night roosting nearby. The birds were silent but focused. And they were hungry.

I couldn’t believe it. I rushed outside just in time to catch two vultures on the deer carcass, gouging out the deer’s eyeballs and gums. They spooked when I climbed into my blind, but forty-five minutes later they were back with a dozen friends, poking their heads into every orifice right in front of my camera lens.

I still remember the success of that feast like it was yesterday. Twenty turkey vultures and a few ravens cleaned that deer down to bare bones in less than a week. Each morning, I found about a dozen of them roosting hunchbacked on top of the house and nearby utility poles, loafing with ghoulish preoccupation as they digested between feedings. The deer, at the center of a trampled area of grass, became the greatest bird feeder I’d ever seen.

When the whole animal had been finally cleaned up, the vultures departed as silently as they’d arrived, leaving me with a series of suitably gory mealtime photographs. After a very long time, the streams of whitewashed guano plastering the yard and the smell in the kitchen also disappeared (as did the strained grins of my parents). But my vulture enthusiasm lingers.

In retrospect, I just wish I’d slid a Hefty bag
under
the deer carcass before dropping it in the trunk. That smell may be heaven to a vulture, but I never quite got used to it. The essence
of my precious deer lived for months in the upholstery of my car, long after all those vultures had sensibly migrated south for the winter. At least the scent reminded me, every time I went for a drive, that my gruesome friends would soon be back. When the days started getting longer, and the Oregon rain began to slack off, I monitored the sky with new hope—optimistically searching for the first turkey vulture of spring.

snow flurries

OWLS, INVASIONS, AND WANDERLUST

J
ust after seven a.m. on October 28, 2011, a commuting birder in northeast Minnesota was startled to notice a snowy owl perched on a lamppost, like a ghostly apparition, next to the bridge that connects Duluth to Superior, Wisconsin. He called his wife, who relayed the sighting on a local rare-bird alert. Three days later, on Halloween, another snowy owl eerily materialized in southwest Minnesota. Then several more popped up across the Midwest. Birders all over North America began to take note. Was this the beginning of an invasion?

By late November, hundreds of snowy owls were lighting up birding hotlines from Oregon to New Jersey and as far south as Kansas, causing expensive traffic jams of cameras and spotting scopes wherever the owls appeared. There could be no doubt: The winter of 2011–2012 was shaping up to be one of the biggest snowy owl irruptions—or population shifts—in history.

On Thanksgiving Day, staff at Honolulu International Airport discovered a white owl sitting on the airfield—the nearest approximation to tundra in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—and, never having dealt with such an obstacle, promptly shot the bird in the name of aircraft safety, never mind that it was the first wild snowy owl ever to have appeared in Hawaii. At Logan International Airport in Boston, where a few owls had landed in past winters, officials were more levelheaded. Inundated by more than forty snowies, they painstakingly captured each one, marked the birds’ heads with colorful paint to keep track of them, and moved them to safer locations.

As December and January unfolded, thousands more snowy
owls drifted south. In Missouri, where the previous record high count had been eight, fifty-five were discovered. Kansas had one hundred sixty. One birder in South Dakota ticked twenty of them in seven hours, while observers in Vancouver, British Columbia, counted thirty-one in a single spot at Boundary Bay. A Dallas police officer who casually mentioned to a friend that he’d been watching a snowy owl on a light fixture at his local marina caused a stampede of chasers; it was the first one in Texas in fifty years.

Nobody forgets their first snowy owl sighting. To see one, two feet tall, nearly pure white, with piercing yellow eyes, a wild incarnation of Harry Potter’s pet Hedwig, is to gaze into the very soul of the Arctic. Most of us rarely get the chance, because snowies usually stay out of sight of civilization, tucked in the narrow latitudinal belt between the Arctic Ocean and boreal treeline from northern Europe to Russia and Canada, in some of the harshest terrain on earth. They spend most of their lives in the chilly, windswept tundra, where a steady supply of lemmings—small, cute rodents related to voles, which occupy the tundra, eat grass, and reproduce a lot—feeds generation after generation of owls.

Every few winters, though, snowies show up south of their normal range, sometimes in big numbers. In 1916, for instance, more than 1,000 snowies were reported in Washington alone. Many of them never left. Birders at the time carried shotguns instead of binoculars, and a lot of snowy owl specimens from that year can still be found in local attics and museums. Because they stand out and tend to cause excitement when they appear, movements of snowies have been noted for as long as people have been paying attention to birds; particularly large North American irruptions occurred in the winters of 1947–1948, 1966–1967, 1973–1974, 1984–1985, and 1996–1997.

Snowy owl invasions are said to reflect a grim cycle. The owls, according to classic biological literature, are driven out of their homes by food shortages. When northern lemming populations crash every few years, owls are forced to flee south, and most of the birds that reach the United States are starving. It’s a textbook example of the delicate predator–prey balance.

It can also be a sad story. A newspaper article, “Snowy Owl Invasion Ends in Tragedy,” published in March 2012 after most of the owls had disappeared, warned that the birds hadn’t fared well: “99.9 percent that come this far never make it home,” one rehabilitator lectured.

Another expert quoted in
The New York Times
agreed. “These birds are starving to death,” he said. “No question.” It didn’t help that according to the narrative, many of the owls were being harassed by birders and photographers who had no qualms about approaching dangerously close to the birds. Bad news for the owls. Their tragedy presented a sad finale to an otherwise compelling story.

At least it would have, if the tragedy were true.

—

THAT DECEMBER,
I got a tip about a possible snowy owl sighting at Fern Ridge Reservoir just west of Eugene, Oregon. Half a dozen snowies had already been reported in the state, which in many years sees none. One celebrated bird behind a retirement village in Albany, Oregon, had received hundreds of visitors, but I hadn’t gone to see it. I decided to chase down the more isolated Eugene sighting instead.

Fern Ridge is a large, shallow lake, drawn down in winter for flood control. In December, most of its area is covered by a mudflat dotted by stumps of trees logged in the 1930s. The mudflat is three miles wide, nearly perfectly flat, and resembles
a moonscape—or, possibly, to a snowy owl’s discerning eye, Arctic tundra. Peregrine falcons, bald eagles, and other raptors like to perch on the stumps, but a local birder had just photographed a round white blob out there that suggested a snowy. Unfortunately, the area is a major pain to access.

The only way to get close enough for a definitive identification was to slog across the mudflat. I packed my rubber boots, spotting scope, and camera, and drove to Fern Ridge on a chilly Monday morning.

The place was deserted. From the edge of the lake bed, my naked eye couldn’t detect anything except mud, mud, and more mud, stretching nearly to the horizon. When I peered closer through my high-powered spotting scope, though, I noticed a white smudge on a distant stump. It was too far away to be sure, even magnified sixty times, but it could have been a snowy owl. Or a milk jug. I locked up the car, put on my boots, shouldered my scope and camera, and walked into the moonscape.

It was immediately obvious why the original observer hadn’t attempted to get closer. Mud curled around the soles of my boots, and I made slow, squelching progress. As I worked my way farther toward the center of the lake bed, the ground became softer and my feet sank six inches on every step. A couple of times, when my boot stuck in the muck, I tripped and fell forward, burying my outstretched glove in ooze to save my camera. Discarded boat motors, tires, and beer bottles lay scattered among the stumps, half buried in black silt. In summer, windsurfers and yachts would have been whipping around above my head. Now, I heaved my legs across the deserted, sloppy mud, sweating under my jacket in the 40-degree weather.

Every so often I stopped to glance at the distant white blob, but it remained veiled by ground shimmer, sitting stationary.
For all my efforts, I was hardly moving, either. I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was a snowy owl or something else.

It took more than an hour to slog close enough for the speck to resolve into something recognizable. By then I was a mile from my car and completely surrounded by a barren expanse of silt. Nothing moved except for a small flock of dunlin, small shorebirds that periodically wheeled around the mudflat on a cold breeze.