Vultures are often depicted as an ominous sign of imminent death, circling high above the ground and awaiting the death of the wounded person below. But in reality this is not the case, experts say.
“I've never heard of a real case where they circled a dying person. There probably aren't that many people dying there anyway,” he said. Chris McClure at The Peregrine Fund, which is headed by Global Predator Impact Network (GRIN), a bird of prey data collection tool.
These thermals are columns of rising air caused by the sun's uneven heating of the Earth's surface. Warmer air is less dense than colder air, so above the heated ground, air pockets become lighter and rise, creating an updraft.
Typically, the showers are tornado-shaped: they are small and weak near the ground, which causes vultures to spin in small circles when they are low, but as the air gets warmer higher up, the flows become larger and the birds move in larger circles, 2017. study disclosed.
Vultures and other predators such as eagles, buzzards and kites use these currents as invisible elevators to gain height and then as highways along which they can travel with little energy. Birds can either continue circling in the same flow or use the extra energy to take off in search of new free flight.
So most of the time when you see a vulture circling, it's just staying where the thermals are best, conserving energy and looking for carrion or a dead animal to eat, McClure said, or perhaps sniffing it out – some species such as How turkey vultures (Catartes aura) have an excellent sense of smell and smell a chemical called ethyl mercaptan released when a corpse decomposes to find carrion in dense forests without seeing visual clues.
Once the birds spot a potential meal, they can circle around to check that the animal is truly dead and that large predators have not already opened the carcass (making it easier for the vultures to eat) and that the shore is now clear for the birds to descend safely.
The biggest misconception about vultures, however, is that they carry disease, McClure says. Birds eat dead and decaying carcasses of animals, including roadkill, but they prevent disease rather than spread it. “We call them the nature cleanup team,” he said.
It's because Vultures' stomachs contain a mixture of highly acidic and deadly bacteria.and if they feed on, for example, the carcasses of animals infected with anthrax, rabies, salmonella or cholera, the pathogens are destroyed in their stomachs and can no longer spread.
“Vultures are incredibly important to ecosystems,” McClure said. “They eat carrion, and they eat it in large quantities.”
According to McClure, one key example of this was the sharp decline in the number of Indian vultures. Birds were once everywhere here, but more than two decades ago they began dying due to the use of diclofenac, a non-steroidal painkiller for cattle.
Vultures that fed on the carcasses of animals treated with the drug suffered kidney failure and died. By the mid-1990s, the vulture population had dropped to almost zero. This meant bacteria and infections, including rabiesspreading from contaminated carcasses that would otherwise have been eaten by vultures, resulting in about half a million people died between 2000 and 2005.
Tracking vultures using GPS gives people another benefit, McClure says: We help identify where poaching is happening. “There are probably thousands of vultures living there with GPS devices transmitting their location. A really cool thing we do in Africa is use GPS-tagged vultures to catch poachers,” he said. This is because vultures find corpses before the authorities do and gather around them. If there are a lot of vultures, it means the carcass is big, so it could be poaching,” he said.
