Vulture Nest

     Yesterday (February 16) in the early afternoon, I climbed up the bluff the other side of the creek and discovered a vulture nest with one egg.  Years I've been looking for one. This was exciting for me.

     In the first photograph below the view is northwest, with the green-colored Pond to the upper right and the darker green Great Oak to the top left and mostly blocking our home. My camera has been broken, so I've been confined to the iPhone camera lately.

     Anyhow, I still don't know if this is black vulture (Coragyps atratus) or turkey vulture (Cathartes aura).

     Our turkey vultures seem always to be with us here in the Small Canyon, and that fact confers for me a familial sort of feeling akin to hearing a familiar voice in a distant room of a large house. When fish come and go (more go than come, this winter), and flowers bloom for their season and wither away like the grass of the field, the vultures can nearly always be seen teetering on their great dihedral wings above us or perching opposite the Creek or behind the house. Summer, autumn, winter, and spring the vultures remain with us. Only a few miles north of us runs a line demarcating the extent of their year-round range. From Central Texas up into southern Canada the turkey vultures visit only in the summer.

     Here are a few more pieces of information we know about this favorite bird of ours:

• That dihedral shape to their nearly six-foot wide, outstretched wings (both wings tilted slightly upwards) enables them to soar with greater ease because, like the dihedral wings of an airplane, when the bird or plane tilts to one side, that wing receives the stronger force of upward air movement and this rights the bird or plane once again. Stability in what is known as “roll axis” is part of the function of this wing-shape. Not every soaring bird (eagles, for instance) have this dihedral shape, though.
• The part of the brain responsible for smelling such things as carrion is much larger in our vultures than in other birds. They can detect odors carried by several molecules out of a trillion. (See John James Audubon and his 1826 experiments to test the smell of the Turkey Vulture.)
• Perhaps because of its lack of any conventional bird-nest-in-a tree, it will usually scrape aside a small area in an inaccessible spot, often on the edge of a cliff. Like the one we saw. If attacked, at least the parent vulture would only have to defend against one side of the nest. 
• One to three eggs are set in this “nest,” with two being the norm.
• Incubation can last five weeks, after which time both parents (who mate for life) share in feeding the young.
• The young will fledge at sixty to eighty days and continue to be fed by the parents for another one to three weeks. At twelve weeks they will leave the area.

     And then (on Saturday, February 15) we picked up three Texas dall sheep (all ewes here) to start a small flock. We'll work on getting more later and perhaps a ram, though our preference is to rent out one when that time comes around.

Resuscitating the Waning Taste for Life

     From Loren Eisley’s The Immense Journey and his chapter entitled “The Judgment of Birds,” we read the following:

     “It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.
     “The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted. We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life. His great news services, his world-wide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain that it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give—a natural revelation.” (pages 163-164)

     I’ve copied this passage to remind me of the following primary assumptions of my life:

•      Nature is our home, both archetypal and actual.
•      Most things in our artificial world unwittingly conspire to have us forget this.
•      And when this world is too much with us, getting and spending, we can return to nature even if is only a shadow of the wilderness it used to be. We are made better every single time we walk through woods or a prairie, stalk mushrooms across a floor of moss and fern, strain through binoculars to identify waterbirds in a marsh, or slowly pick over a rocky creekside in a small canyon. I always feel my emotions and intellect elevated by the end of such forays, and for hours afterwards I am alive. I am alive.
•      We cannot leave nature after these times unchanged for the better, and often the change can be translated into our language as some corrective to how we have been living or thinking. It is not an unhealthy thing to return to the world of people. It is perhaps necessary and what we bring back may be the boon for which the people have been waiting.
•      This is the true religion and the corrupted source for every other one.