When I was much younger, I worked for about four years in a nature park in central Florida. We had a lot of animals there, and a large part of my job was caring for them. We were also part of group of wildlife rehabilitation organizations, so we were always taking in sick, injured, and orphaned wildlife. During that time, I got to work with some very cool animals, and learned a lot from some top people in the field. One of my all time favorites was a black vulture that came to us as a baby and had to be hand raised.

Baby birds are not the cutest little things. In fact, most of them are downright ugly! The baby vulture was no exception. It had a bald, black head, and black pin feathers coming in all over the rest of it’s bald body. It was all head and belly with little short legs, huge feet, and almost no wings at all. As most of you probably know, vultures eat carrion (dead animals). Parent vultures will then go back to the nest and regurgitate into the open mouths of their young. Fortunately, for us, they will also eat ground up fresh meat! We took care of it for one night and then it went to one of our bird raising experts. He fed the baby with a puppet that looked like and adult vulture, but despite that, it did become quite attached to him. As he got the baby weaned, he began taking it outside to teach it to fly and start learning how to be a bird. After it became good at flight, he would allow it out on it’s own for longer and longer periods. Eventually, it was outside most of the time, but it was still very friendly with people and it liked to go inside sometimes still.

One afternoon while I was working, my boss came back to our area, looking for someone to go on a semi-emergency wildlife call. He explained that someone had called in a panic because a large, black bird had flown in through their sliding glass doors and was now in their living room and wouldn’t leave. I volunteered and we gathered nets, gloves, a cage, and towels and headed out. When we got there the home owner was waiting in the front yard in hysterics. While she had been trying to shoo it back outside, the bird had flown at her and tried to land on her head. She refused to go back inside until we had the bird removed. When we went in, we were expecting a crow or maybe a grackle, but the bird in her house was a black vulture! It seemed very comfortable, perched on the back of the couch, and didn’t mind us approaching at all. Our friend the bird rehabber lived about three doors down, so it didn’t take long to figure out exactly who the bird was. It was our ugly baby, all grown up!

To make a long story a bit shorter, we easily collected our vulture friend without using a single piece of the equipment we had brought, and took him back to the park. My boss called the rehabber and told him what happened, and between the two of them it was decided that the bird should go to live at the Audubon Society where they had flight cages where our bird could interact with other vultures and hopefully learn to become more wild. If that failed, they would use him/her in their captive breeding (black vultures are a threatened species) and educational programs. I don’t know whether our feathered friend ever made it back to the wild or not, but I’m sure that either way, it was better than having him fly into people’s homes! That little adventure always stuck with me, though, and has left me with a special place in my heart for vultures.