Great idea!! And enjoyed the countdown of days. This I find fascinating as I love raptors, vultures and owls especially. In NE Texas where I took care of a huge lab and a ranch for about a year, the turkey vultures were as common as our PNW robins or crows. Black vultures tended to live in very large groups on water towers in some small towns. (a bit spooky for an out of towner...made me think of Deadwood...or that just maybe the town was cursed...not to cast negative thoughts onto such interesting birds!) I guess they were city dwellers and the turkey vultures preferred the farm land?

As far as roadkill observations and the plentiful turkey vultures, they did enjoy roadkill but were keen on observing the rare car passing. Only once did I drive up to a group and they refused to leave their lunch so I drove around them. They seemed to like eating back off the road in ditches more often. If there was something large like a cow carcass in a field, all bets were off, they gathered in a feeding frenzy and left clean bones just a few days later.

Thank you for sharing the raccoon, the vultures will be grateful I'm sure. Btw, one thing I learned in TX, the TV have a keener sense of smell (amazingly so!) so black vultures will tend to follow the TV's. Hope I remembered that correctly.

T.L. Stokes
Sammamish


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