Why turkey vultures are summer's super-intelligent superheroes: Nature News

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17-06-2025

With summer just around the corner, I would like to highlight one of my favorite birds — the turkey vulture.
For me, they conjure up hot summer days as I watch them ride and circle in the updrafts. When I was young, they were a summer bird, where I lived in New York, migrating south in the winter. I have an old Peterson's Field Guide from 1961 (my birth year!) which has them breeding only as far north as western Connecticut and New York. They never made it this far north and were only first documented breeding in Maine as recently as the 1970s. These days, they are common all summer, and if the weather is mild enough, they hang around all winter. But even so, I will always think of them as a bird of summer. They can't circle up to those awesome heights without summer's heat.
The Center for Wildlife gave a raptor program at Great Works Land Trust's BonAire Celebration at Beach Plum Farm in Ogunquit this past weekend. The first bird that Quinn (the CFW Nature Center lead) brought out was a vulture named Violet. Seeing her up close was such a treat and what we learned reminded me of just what superheroes these birds are.
Super intelligent (at least compared to wise old owls whose eyes are actually bigger than their brains), vulture intelligence is thought to be at least on par with our smartest dogs. They also have both super-powered vision (can see things a mile away) and sense of smell. Unlike their cousin, the black vulture, who relies more on sight, the turkey vulture has olfactory organs that are unusually well-developed for a bird.
According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the turkey vulture has larger nares (bird nostrils), olfactory chambers, and olfactory bulbs than most other vultures. We often put cayenne in our bird food to discourage squirrels — this works because our bird feeder birds have such a poor sense of smell. I wonder what a turkey vulture would do with a cayenne-laced carcass?
Turkey vultures usually don't kill their prey and are instead attracted to carrion. Hot days are great for this kind of hunting because the heat volatilizes all those great odors of rotting flesh and carries them skyward. Interestingly, they are also attracted to mushrooms and flowers with carrion-like fragrances. The actual chemicals they are using as cues haven't been fully identified, but one study had a positive result for a chemical called ethyl mercaptan. Natural gas companies subsequently took advantage of this finding and introduced ethyl mercaptan into their pipelines using turkey vulture circling behavior to identify leaks!
One of the turkey vultures' other superpowers involves their digestive capabilities. Turkey vultures are named after the wild turkey because of their bare, red-colored head. The bare head helps them stay clean while diving headfirst into a rotting carcass. Their scientific name is Cathartes aura, meaning 'golden purifier' or 'golden breeze.'
The 'purifier' part of this refers to their role as a scavenger — part of nature's clean-up crew. Recent studies have brought an even deeper meaning to this name. A turkey vulture's stomach acid is extremely acidic, with a pH close to zero, allowing them to eat carcasses infected with diseases like anthrax or rabies without contracting the disease. This is great for us and other local wildlife. If they didn't eat that infected carrion, some other animal might become infected and spread the disease. Quinn cited one study that found a strong positive correlation between increasing turkey vulture populations and a decrease in rabies!
These are just some reasons to welcome turkey vultures into our skies this summer. Turkey vultures have a very characteristic teetering glide, holding their wings in a v-shape (think 'V' for vulture) that distinguishes them from other large raptors. Watch for them riding the updrafts as summer quickly approaches.
Susan Pike, a researcher and an environmental sciences and biology teacher at Dover High School, welcomes your ideas for future column topics. Send your photos and observations to [e-mail]. Read more of her Nature News columns online at Seacoastonline.com and pikes-hikes.com, and follow her on Instagram @pikeshikes.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Why turkey vultures are summer's unsung superheroes: Nature News