Becoming of Vultures

Written by Chris Robey

I had just arrived at my new psychiatrist’s office for my intake appointment. I pulled into the parking lot and, after scanning briefly for an open spot, steered toward a large black pickup parked at the edge of the lot where it faced a ribbon of woods. As I pulled up next to the truck, something perched on the driver-side mirror caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a raptor-shaped decoy or some other ornament. It was just days away from Halloween, and the truck’s owner could have given themselves over to the spirit of the season. My heart lept when the thing jerked its head slantwise and peered at me with an eye like a bead of India ink. Its face was like a rotten Osage orange. I was being regarded by a black vulture. 

I parked, got out, and slowly approached the front of the truck. The vulture continued peering at me over the hood. When I reached the other side, a burst of movement in the grass jostled me again. Not just one but an entire committee of vultures had gathered at the brushy edge of the woods, eight or nine in all. They recollected themselves, some slowly backing into the brush, others bobbing their heads and shrugging their woolly shoulders, all staring me down with the same glimmering eyes as their companion. 

A voice from behind broke the deadlock. “Excuse me?”

I turned to see a woman in marine fatigues, boots, and a tight bun approaching. 

“I’m so sorry to ask this of you, but would you mind shooing them off?” she said, fingering her keyfob. “They freak me out.”

I agreed and did so gently. The vultures rustled again but otherwise quietly withdrew into the brush. The ringleader fluttered down from its roost and joined the throng. 

The woman stepped closer once the vultures were gone. “Thanks, so sorry to keep you!” she said. 

I told her it was no problem at all and started toward the entrance to the office building. As I passed by the passenger door of the pickup, it cracked open to reveal another woman who peered out toward where the committee had gathered. She had been sitting inside the truck the whole time, eyeing the lead vulture on the mirror warily just as it had been regarding her. 

It makes sense that someone like the first woman—presumably a service member who had witnessed or precipitated violent death or likely would one day—should be fearful of vultures. As for the rest of us, what is it about them that elicits such revulsion? That the business of scavenging carcasses is grisly and odorous is a given, and we generally do not like reminders of our mortality. There’s also a reminder of our inescapable animal-ness in the way their bodily functions are so unabashedly and prominently on display—they squabble, gorge themselves, projectile vomit when startled, and soil themselves to stay cool. 

Human babies do many of these things, too. How is it, then, that when met with other displays of bodily reality we shy away, shoo them off, or meet them with displays of force? 

Putting aside the fact that he was a scheming, boastful bigot who mostly killed what he loved, there are parts of John J. Audubon’s entry on black vultures in Birds of America that I am quite taken with. I do think he lingers too much on the qualities that relegate vultures to the untouchables of the avian world, however. Still, his observations are important because they reflect how most Americans continue to regard vultures; namely, as carrion crows, haunting meat markets, keeping company with feral dogs, casting shadows over the slaughterhouse, painting their roosts with ordure, tainting cistern water, stalking carts of offal on their way to landfills at the city’s edge, grunting, hissing, and gobbling up all manner of ripe flesh. He comments on the force with which they disgorge their stomach’s contents with a kind of wonder, and also notes their characteristic obstinateness. Upon approaching a two-acre roost host to thousands in the swamps outside Charleston, he and a companion “kept up a brisk fusillade for several minutes,” killing an unspecified number. Those that survived the volley began reconvening in the same trees soon after the gunmen retired for the night.

I just recently learned of how the people of Bunn, North Carolina—a small town 30 miles northeast of Raleigh—have been “besieged” by a “plague” of vultures since 2020. When all else failed, they resorted to using cannon fire to scare the birds off. The apparatus employed is actually fascinating—a propane-fueled sound cannon installed on the roof of the local high school and electronically programmed to fire every day in the morning, afternoon, and evening for two weeks straight. Each blast reaches upwards of 130 decibels and sounds like a skeet shooter with an itchy trigger finger. They are not harmful, ostensibly, and are admittedly a more humane solution than Audubon’s habit of disgorging the contents of his gun. Even so, there is something to be said for making it illegal to kill or maim vultures while sanctioning contraptions that shave a year or two off their lifespans. The use of less-than-lethal weapons on protesters is questionable enough. Their use on animals strikes me with the same bluster as North Korea’s missile tests or parents screaming at school board meetings. Both are tactics of riot police. And while it worked for a time, the vultures of Bunn just as soon resumed their posts. 

I have wondered if the vultures circling the fields of Antietam made Lincoln reconsider his invocation of “the better angels of our nature.” By other ways of reckoning, however, vultures are those better angels. Ancient Zoroastrians and modern-day Parsis maintain that it is by the vulture’s mystic eye—so adept at spotting carrion when airborne—that souls are ferried into the afterlife. The diameter of the dakhma, or “Towers of Silence,” is set to be no smaller than 300 feet—room enough for vultures to take off and land as they fulfill their role in purifying the dead. A similar premise is enacted through the Tibetan practice of jhator, or ”scattering to the birds.” One’s body is given up in a final act of charity. Blessed deconstitution, the surrendering of material form to the economy of being. 

One of my favorite poems is William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” The poem reaches well beyond the currents in 19th-century Romanticism it’s typically confined to and stands out to me now for the way it speaks to how vultures can be both deathly omens and visiting angels. When Bryant urges us to go forth under the open sky to receive Nature’s teachings and elegizes the surrender of our individual beings to the elements, I cannot help but think of sky burials and their edification in structures like the dakhma or spaces like the charnel grounds. There is an irony in this, as the poem also hastened a flattening of death and its subsequent edification in the rural cemetery movement. If you’ve been to any municipal cemetery built during the 19th century in the United States, you’ve seen its effects: rolling hills and dells cloaked in arboreal splendor, lined with monuments both humble and ornate and traversed by serpentine paths. These features make for an idyllic and placid deathscape, both physically and emotionally. 

The Civil War, with its meeting of archaic tactics with modern armaments, thoroughly obliterated whatever Romantic notions of death Americans still clung to. For those directly involved in the conflict, death’s too-realness was readily apparent; for those insulated from the killing fields, however, the shock of witnessing their carnal truth had yet to set in. This particular trauma and its accompanying shift in thought is well exemplified by the public debut of Matthew Brady’s 1862 exhibition, “The Dead of Antietam.” The exhibits, which featured photographs taken by Brady’s then-employee Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson, provided many with their first glimpse of the field’s most bountiful crop on that mid-September day. For those who had already borne witness, it was like taking in the aftermath anew. The photographs themselves frankly revealed the frozen agony of the dead soldiers, uniformly maimed yet individually distinguishable. The multiple layers of censorship that surfaced in the wake of the exhibit’s debut are also telling: woodblock reproductions of the photographs softened the soldiers’ features so that they could have collapsed just as readily from exhaustion as from a hail of minié balls. In so doing, mutilated and identifying features alike were obscured.  

We seem to need that softening, for the shock of death’s reality is often too bright to look at directly. In her book When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön calls on three methods of reaching through the glare of mortal awareness toward joy: “no more struggle,” “using poison as medicine,” and “seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom.” Some Tibetans maintain that the vultures congregating at charnel grounds are bodhisattvas in disguise; their effortless enactment of these methods lends credence to this belief. 

Regarding the first method: vultures tend to be inactive until late morning to midday when the sun has been out long enough to thoroughly warm the earth’s surface. When they finally do take flight, they take advantage of the heated air columns emanating from the sun-soaked ground. Rather than wasting energy flapping their broad wings to lift their cumbersome bodies, they allow themselves to be borne aloft on the thermals.

Regarding the second method: a buzzard’s guts are a miraculous thing. There are very few obligate scavengers in nature, a key reason being that the longer a corpse decomposes, the more toxic compounds it produces. The Zoroastrians were remarkably astute in noting that a corpse will pollute the elements around it. By most biologists’ accounts, however, it is not the dreaded Nasu assuming the form of a fly that contaminates the body, but rather the dead organism’s own microbiota initiating the process of decomposition by dissolving it from the inside out. Vultures not only have one of the most acidic stomachs in the animal kingdom, but their intestinal microbiota also consists largely of Clostridia and Fusobacteria—bacteria found in carrion that would be lethally pathogenic in any other animal. It would seem that vultures have recruited these bacteria as their accomplices in a remarkable symbiotic feat, contributing to their ability to consume putrid meat without being poisoned by it.

Regarding the third method: what else is seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom, if not a different form of scavenging? In this, all the world is worshipful. I keep coming back to a time when I drove past a cow field in which several vultures were at rest, their wings outstretched and facing the setting sun. Oh, how the low-angle light caught their wing stars! Assume a horaltic pose and you cannot help but evoke a call to prayer.

I have a friend who lives with his partner in an old farmhouse. Soon after they moved in, they discovered that black vultures had nested in the barn. They do not use the space presently and have allowed the vultures to remain in residence with their nestlings. One evening during a visit, my friend took me out to the barn to introduce me. Lying at the doorstep were shreds of raccoon or possum skin, fragments of leg bone and teeth—a charnel ground not of the Tibetan plateau but the rurnt tobaccolands of the Carolina Piedmont. No sooner than we crossed the doorstep and entered the barn, there came an explosion of wings, the scraping of talons on floorboards, loud thumps in the loft. The smell was pungent, the corners of the barn a drift of feathers, bones, and splattered droppings. He motioned toward the place where their greenish eggs had lain, a patch of leftover hay in one of the mule stalls.

There was something eerily familiar in that hybrid, transitional space, where the relics of past human life had become a nesting ground. The vultures still live there, sun themselves on the porch with my friends’ cats, and stay perched on the railing when they pull into the driveway. They have found a niche in my friends’ lives. And mine, too, for I’ve found in them a lesson for how to live not only with the non-human but also with the nearness of that which scares us most.

I’ve been dancing around the subject so far, so let me say it straight: we’re two steps away from being carrion. Worm food. Buzzards’ buffet. Our individuality dissolves in death; memory is but an impression. Even monuments weather. 

So? Bryant said it best: live.

This piece was written by Chris Robey, who also writes as tumbleintheroar. You can find more of his work here.