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.