Cleansing Breeze

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura, Latin for "cleansing breeze")

Well, "cleansing breeze" is just one translation. Others focus on the work of these vultures in cleansing the land of its rotting flesh.

Here above we have a display of the “horaltic pose," with a turkey vulture drying out its wings while warming in morning light above the Creek. About an hour after sunrise.

"Spread-wing postures may serve different purposes in different species. Anhingas, for example, have unusually low metabolic rates and unusually high rates of heat loss from their bodies. Whether wet or dry, they exhibit spread-wing postures mostly under conditions of bright sunlight and cool ambient temperatures, and characteristically orient themselves with their backs to the sun. Thus, it appears that Anhingas adopt a spread-wing posture primarily for thermoregulation -- to absorb solar energy to supplement their low metabolic heat production and to offset partly their inordinately high rate of heat loss due to convection and (when wet) evaporation from their plumage.

Cormorants, in contrast, apparently use spread-wing postures only for drying their wings and not for thermoregulation. Although cormorant plumage also retains water, only the outer portion of the feathers is wettable, so an insulating layer of air next to the skin is maintained when cormorants swim underwater. This difference in feather structure may explain why cormorants can spend more time foraging in the water than Anhingas, and why cormorants can inhabit cooler climes, while the Anhinga is restricted to tropical and subtropical waters.

Spread-wing postures appear to serve for both thermoregulation and drying in Turkey Vultures. These birds maintain their body temperature at a lower level at night than in the daytime. Morning wing-spreading should provide a means of absorbing solar energy and passively raising their temperature to the daytime level. Field observations indicate that this behavior is associated with the intensity of sunlight and also occurs more frequently when the birds are wet than when they are dry."

https://web.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Spread-Wing_Postures.html

Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus)

The Latin "atratus" means "clothed in black, as if for mourning." These are seen preening on a snag above Hamilton Creek.

This early afternoon when I was covered in mosquito spray, sunscreen, sweat, dirt, and something between the itch of grass and the irritation of chigger-spit, we took to the Pond and washed off the heat of the day in spring waters.  And watched as two black vultures slowly drank in the shallows of a gravel bar a hundred feet away.

Drummond's Wild Petunia
(Ruellia drummondiana)

 The Ruellia drummondiana above was photographed by Dmel the first week of August.

Cottonmouth / Water Moccasin (Agkistrodon piscivorus)

The mid-August sweetheart on the stones above appeared gray as the dried stream bed until it wet its scales in what's left of the Creek (below).

The mid-sized rattlesnake above is the first we've spotted on the property. And just feet out back of the kitchen windows (as of last week).

Cleansing Breeze in Sycamore Leaves

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.