sunning buzzards

ok, those are just unsettling. everyone seems to agree it's common, and i'm sure it is... i'm just especially unobservant of vultures, i guess!

heeeey, good call on the UV light. very interesting! if i get nothing else from this, it's true i need more sunlight. i'm a pale, blue-eyed redhead and a graveyard shift worker by choice. i'm skeered of the sun! but i do feel better if i have some at least every few days.

spread... my... uh, wings... *looks at her sig line*

*facepalm*

hee.

I'm a very pale skinned person too, who lives on lat 56N & gets very little sun. And I worked nights all my life because I liked it BUT I just had my vitD checked and it was so low it was out of sight. If you don't get out in the sun then take vitD for godsake or you will get flu

The Lakota Sioux man I once lived with, who taught me how to work with leather, was considered pretty out there by most people. But I learned so much from him. Where ever we went, he saw things that other people didn't see. It ranged from the interesting to the far fetched.

On seeing a crow coming towards him he would say "Someone has something to tell me."

I picked up many of his ways without even realizing it, and it makes life fuller and more meaningful. He also had his demons, so it can be a double edged sword.

We have tons of Turkey Vultures here, they fly so beautifully.

You'll find out what the birds mean soon.

There's a lot to the subject of vultures. It's one of my two totem animals, although I'm not really into the dining experience aspect.

To touch on two of the things already said

They are in the Order of raptors, to which eagles and hawks also belong

There are probably several reasons for this wing-spreading behavior, including warming or cooling the body, exercise, pleasure and courtship, but hygiene is almost certainly at the top of the list. Hygiene is also the reason for their bald heads.

Other tidbits:

Vultures have the most efficient means of travel of any animal on Earth, measured in calories expended per pound per mile. They are the most glorious flyers, although the most dynamic is the falcon. The condor tops the efficiency scale.

In parts of the Himalayas the human dead are cut up and fed to the vultures as the main sacred funeral rite

A very interesting thing to do is find the tree that the Wake (the name for a flock) roosts in at night and be waiting at the base of the tree when they come home. They will circle you up close and silently for a long time, so its uncool and rude to do this for too long. There will be feathers there too.

There is an Egyptian vulture goddess named Nekhebet, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nekhebet

If I ever did a Tarot deck, the ten of swords would have five vultures circling high in the sky, watching for signs of life to erase.

I once saw seven vultures and eight bald eagles sharing the same dead elk.

I wouldn't dismiss looking at them as a symbol of the beauty that we overlook, because it isn't glamorous enough for our species-centric tastes.

I continue to be dismayed at the people who made and updated the Medicine Cards deck and still haven't shown enough wisdom to include the vulture (or the lowly vole). I just can't trust the narrow minds of people like that.

They are sunning themselves to clean their wings.

Turkey vultures eat road kills and other dead animals. Their feet, beaks and feathers are often contaminated with bacteria from the often long-dead animals. Sunning themselves allows the sun’s ultraviolet rays to kill the bacteria.

That’s why they take sun baths. When the sun rises in the morning, the instant the sun’s rays shine on a vulture, its wings automatically spread wide.

When I worked as curator of the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, Calif., back in the 1970s, we had several non-releasable turkey vultures we kept on display and used for educational purposes.

In the morning when I turned on the lights in the museum, the vultures instantly spread their wings.

Click to expand...

Respectfully borrowed from one of those links Debra posted.

Steffi, I guess maybe the message for you is to spread your wings and let the sun clean the bacteria off you after you have your next meal?

How lucky you are to be able to gather feathers in New Orleans! I envy you! It's always been the one place in the whole world I've always wanted to see and I love feathers!

What's this about Stefficus in New Orleans? That poor city has no idea what it's in for......

Bradford, I didn't know a flock of buzzards was called a wake, that's wonderful.