10.
Tenth in a series of short writings about our recent ecotourism trip to Costa
Rica
You
don’t have to go to Costa Rica to see black vultures, Coragyps atratus. There’s a pretty good population of them
throughout much of the New World, including Oklahoma, where I first learned
their scientific name under the tutelage of George M. Sutton, famous
ornithologist at OU. There’s also one at the Wild Bird Rescue, Inc.,
headquarters at 4611 Lakeshore Drive, Wichita Falls, Texas, where it displays
what the average person would consider some rather un-vulture-like behavior,
for example, preening the hair of its handler and jumping from window to window
to check out visitors walking along the wooden deck outside its building. In
Costa Rica, late February, among our traveling companions, C. atratus quickly became the “black-headed vultures” as opposed to
“red-headed vultures” which were Cathartes
aura, turkey vultures, also a common species in the United States, although
commonly occurring further north than do C.
atratus.
So
why do I finish this series of short writings about an ecotourism trip with
comments on vultures? That’s a pretty good question for which I have no answer,
except that two of my previous contacts with New World vultures were pretty
memorable, and in preparation for our other ecotourism trips, to Botswana and
Tanzania, I studied my Old World vultures, hoping to see several species up
close. Old World vultures are not closely related to New World vultures, thus
provide a pretty good example of convergent evolution.
Evidently, if you’re digging around in carcasses, head feathers are an
evolutionary liability, thus the baldness of vultures in general.
What
made those previous encounters with vultures so memorable? One, in the Arbuckle
Mountains of southern Oklahoma, was with a really small chick. I crawled into a
hole and there it was, beautiful, looking up, maybe asking for a piece of dead
rabbit. I was on a field trip with George M. Sutton at the time, and we passed
the “nestling” around before returning it to its crevice. The second encounter
was also on a trip with Sutton, to western Oklahoma, where he knew about a nest
in an abandoned chicken coop. I crawled in between the boards and was
confronted with an adolescent turkey vulture who stood up and slowly
regurgitated, about an inch from my nose, the most putrid mass of stuff I’ve
ever smelled. Sutton thought that was pretty funny. I still get nauseated just
thinking about that event from back in the 60s. My encounters with African
vultures were all via camera, although for a book that’s coming out in April, I
did a drawing of one to introduce a chapter entitled “A Warning.” No, in that
chapter, if you read Africa Notes:
Reflections of an Ecotourist, you won’t be attacked by a vulture, but by
the mental impact of foreign travel and what that travel does to your sense of
what’s happening in our nation today.