It was high noon in Everett (8/28) and I was riding my little truck down the Lowell- Snohomish River Rd, when I spotted a Turkey Vulture circling low over the first big Ag field you drive by south of Everett's Rotary Park. " Well podner" I told my truck, "looks like somebody up and died around here - why just look at that buzzard". I pulled over by the big ditch gate I walked up the little rise there to check out the scene.
The big field was being cut, threshed, whatever, and I remembered reading Diann McRae's last vulture report on tweeters and noting that someone had seen Vultures out on newly threshed fields down in Oregon looking for 'rodent parts', or something. I'd never seen something like that around these parts before, but I had now because out in the field were 13 Vultures on the ground. Most were sort of grouped together, not too tightly, and slowly moving around a bit, looking for something. I was just thinking of Raven's mousing the newly cut hayfields just down the road at Fields Riffle a while ago, when as if on cue, two Raven's flew by me from the North heading to the field also. They split up and both landed near Vultures and joined the search. Also snooping was a single Great blue Heron, and along the field edge, two Harriers were gliding low, one caught a fair sized rodent. Later, around 4pm when I was headed back from Snohomish the field was empty of the 13 vultures - they had been replaced by 13 Raven's, an interesting coincidence I thought.
Reading up on vultures lately I discovered that vultures actually have a pretty narrow window of opportunity to find and eat dead critters. It doesn't take long for something to get too far gone even for a vulture. Vultures have standards. They may also eat grasshoppers and other small injured creatures that pose no threat. There were sure plenty of big "mourning cloak" grasshoppers around, maybe getting threshed slowed them down enough for a Vulture to catch.
Having standards, I wondered if vulture culture included food snobs, just like us human's have.
A bunch of vultures were out in the field when one of them, named Veronica, hissed out to the others "hey look everybody, Victor is eating something thats still moving!"
The response from the group was pretty much stuff like, "still moving? yuck!", " I think I'm gonna barf", "that's gross", "disgusting", etc.
Veronica wasn't about to let this one go. "hey Vick what is that thing you're eating anyway?".
"I don't know, it was pretty good though. So what if it was moving a little bit- lots of animals like fresh food!"
" Now Vick, don't you get 'fresh' with me!" Vicky hissed. "Our gang prefers food that is D-E-A-D"
Then Vigo said " well we all know that Vick is a bit of a turkey anyway. Why I heard he was gobbling up bugs the other day. 'Gobble', get it? That's a little turkey humor! Vick- turkey or vulture - you decide!" Despite lacking the ability, the others all made attempts at making gobbling sounds. They were really having a field day with poor ol Vick.
"Well, I've enjoyed about as much of this abuse as can stand. I'm clearing out" said Vick, and he flew off to another field. Since nobody appreciated his diet nobody followed him and he was alone when he found the rabbit. It was dead. It was good".
Jeff Gibsonstill alive in,Everett Wa
P.S. They were still mowing at four pm, so the field might be interesting to check today.