2005-08-15 - 9:09 a.m.
Vulture update
I know we're in the readership dead zone for the next week, but I'm still okay with not going to Pennsic. We spent the weekend at the farm - talked to another builder, a concrete guy (liked them both), and had Harv and Vic come over to photograph the baby vultures. They're still there, despite the high levels of lime powder in the barn (I guess they won't have much in the way of skin parasites), and bigger, and more aggressive. One of them snapped at Vic when she stood up. Damn, they're cute. They're still hissing, and now they've added ominous arm-flapping (not wings yet, though we can see the pin feathers emerging) to their repetoire of predator-repelling tricks. Honestly, though, I think any predator would run a mile if they got a whiff of these birds; they smell *nasty*. They've also managed to pull the random bits of trash left in the barn around their nesting area, so they look like two extremely ugly homeless bums that smell *really*, *really* bad. Ah, nature. We had some excitement Saturday morning - we noticed the adult vultures were congregating in the woods behind the house, so we went to investigate. There must have been thirty or so of them in the trees and on the ground (before we scared them away - it's okay, they'll be back), and we followed the smell until we found the deer carcass they'd been cleaning up. Nature's janitorial staff. I do love me those vultures. They're incredibly graceful in flight, and while some may say they're ugly as sin, I think they're gorgeous in their own scavenger-of-rotting-meat way. If I could work out how to do it, I'd put up a bird feeder for them (the raccoons would get to it first, unfortunately). The babies, of course, are still fluffy. They probably have a couple of months to go before they'll be ready to fledge, and we'll be checking on them periodically. If the weather stays this hot (103 on Sunday), we'll be able to smell them, too - in fact, I think we may have to burn the barn after they're done - there's no *way* I'm storing anything in there in that funk. ...Or we designate it a wildlife sanctuary and leave it to fall down on its own. It was *seriously* hot - we did the vulture search before 10am on Saturday, and let's just say it's a good thing the wind was blowing *away* from the house - that smell gets disturbingly strong in hot weather. I'll have to keep an eye on the site, though - I'd love to add a deer skull to my collection. Ah, country living. It's grand.
Dorsal - Ventral
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