Black vultures make a fearsome sound, and they’re big – with wing spans of up to seven feet. Their droppings can kill plants below, and prisoners at the Deerfield Correctional Center worry they might spread disease.
At the Wildlife Center of Virginia, Connor Gillespie says that’s unlikely.
“There is not a big risk of disease transmission between avian species and humans – especially outdoors in a well-ventilated area,” he says.
Officials at the prison have warned inmates to stop feeding stray cats and birds during recreation time – believing that will prompt the vultures to leave, but at Virginia Tech Professor of Wildlife Science Jim Parkhurst doubts that will make a difference.
“Turkey vultures might be responsive if there was a considerable amount of food put out for cats, but that alone would not be an attractant for black vultures," he contends.
He suggests using fireworks just before dusk as the birds are coming-in to roost, but timing must be right. If the birds have already landed, loud noises could do more harm than good.
“When they get scared or frightened on the roost, they vomit, and that can create some pretty stinky habitat," he explains.
It’s not legal to shoot turkey vultures, but you can get a federal permit to go after as many as five black vultures, because Professor Parkhurst says, they have begun to threaten newborn livestock in the field.
"The turkey vultures are basically scavengers, so they’re going to be looking for dead animals or animals that are very. close to death," Parkhurst says. "Black vultures in recent decades have become predatory. They are very effective at sort of ganging up on the prey animal that they are intent on bringing down."
At the Wildlife Center of Virginia, Connor Gillespie is glad protections are in place for vultures. He notes they provide an important public service but they’re not popular with people.
“They often think of them as sort of gross animals, but they’re actually sort of nature’s cleanup crew, and they’re helping keep the environment cleaner by removing the carcasses that they find and making the environment a little cleaner for us, so it’s actually great to have them around.”
And he worries that some vultures are poisoned when hunters field-dress deer and other animals – leaving some remains in fields and forests.
“If they use lead ammunition the carcass is riddled with very small pieces of lead, so when scavengers come along, they think that’s the perfect food source.”
But lead poisoning does serious damage to their nervous system and can kill.
Ironically, the birds known best for eating dead things are uneasy around the bodies of their own, and Parkhurst says that creates another way to displace vultures – hanging a deceased one from their roost.
"It literally freaks out the rest of the flock, and they abandon the area, and we have now been able to create some very lifelike effigies that are used also in moving roosts out of residential areas."
He warns that communities planning to do that should be careful not to create bigger problems for others. More than a thousand birds have been known to roost near the Radford Arsenal for example.
"There was a plantation of pine on a section of the arsenal right next to the New River, and the operators of the facility conducted a timber harvest, and so their habitat suddenly disappeared. The roost broke up. Part of it ended up in downtown Radford. Smaller roots appeared in residential areas, and it created a lot of grief for folks," Parkhurst recalls.
Vultures still like the area, and the local population is known to swell at this time of year, as birds from northern areas fly south for the winter.
