Our feature OKI Wanna Know covers your questions on topics ranging from history to government, to infrastructure. This week, we get into some zoology.
Donna Benesch of Saylor Park says big, black birds sometimes nest in her neighborhood's trees.
"I wanna know where the buzzards are going. They usually fly through Saylor Park, and they come in the spring and the fall, and there's hundreds of them," she says. "They usually pick one tree in the neighborhood to roost in, and they all fly in at dusk. You'll see hundreds of them flying over our backyard."
Before we get to their final destination, we need to agree on some terms.
They're often called turkey buzzards, but the director of education at the Cincinnati Zoo says they're not really buzzards. Dan Marsh says thanks to the "shaky architecture of nomenclature," a buzzard is a completely different bird.
"In Great Britain and English-speaking parts of Europe, buzzards are hawks. Our red-tailed hawk is really a red-tailed buzzard, technically speaking," Marsh says. "Somehow or another we conflated that. When Europeans came to the United States and they saw our vultures they called them buzzards."
There are a couple of different kinds of vultures in United States. Black vultures, like their name suggests, are all black. Turkey vultures have black or brown feathers and a red or pink head. They can be found across the contiguous 48 states, while black vultures keep mostly to the southeast and up the Atlantic Coast to Connecticut.
Vultures may have a bad reputation, but they are an important part of the circle of life. They are essentially "nature's janitors" because they clean up the remains of dead animals.
"Most birds can't smell, but turkey vultures... they can smell leaks in gas lines — the sulfur compounds we put in natural gas so that we can smell it, it's an odorless gas," Marsh says. "Those same compounds are very similar to the sulfur compounds that come off a rotting carcass. So they smell them, they all come in, they all converge on that carcass to feed on it."
Marsh says they're "cool" birds.
"One of my favorite things about turkey vultures is that, to defend themselves — it's kind of ingenious, I wish I could do this — they vomit," Marsh says, "It's pretty effective because their digestive enzymes are very acidic, like super acidic. So not only is it repulsive because it smells so bad, it also burns. It's caustic."
Marsh says neither turkey vultures nor black vultures really migrate like sandhill cranes or songbirds. But they're not fans of the cold.
"They have seasonal and regional migrations and they kind of follow the temperatures. Since they're a scavenger and eat carrion, if there's heavy snow cover or if it's extremely cold, it's hard for them to find carcasses because they find them by scent and by sight. Those conditions don't produce thermals in the same way it does in the warmer weather so they have a hard time finding food."
Marsh says when it's cold here, the vultures will generally drift south to Tennessee or Georgia, but even then, he says, if they can find a hot spot, it's not unusual to see the big birds in every month.
"I've seen them around power plants, for example. The old power plant that existed up near New Richmond, there was a spot there where they would hang out and I think it's because it was warmer."
They don't migrate per se, and these birds of a feather don't really flock together either. Marsh says they will meet up for lunch.
"You see them bicker and fuss with each other, but they will share a carcass like that," he says. "Going from that group setting in the spring or the fall is more about safety in numbers. Then, as they are searching across the landscape, they become solitary, but then will converge on a dead carcass."
The village of Hinkley, in Medina County, Ohio, celebrates turkey vultures with a festival every year. Buzzard Day is March 15, which is supposedly the day the vultures return to the community.
Not only do vultures have a holiday, but they have a joke, too.
"When the vulture showed up at the ticket counter at the airport, the service person at the desk said 'Mr. Vulture, do you have anything to check?' And he said 'Nope. Just carrion.' "
Read more:
