The Undertakers Overhead

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Somewhere over your town right now, a turkey vulture is turning slow circles in the sky. It's been doing that — or something very close to it — for five million years. It outlasted ice ages, mass extinctions, and the disappearance of entire species. And today, it's being slowly poisoned by lead ammunition, rodenticides, and the simple fact that most people have never stopped to appreciate what it does.

This episode is a defense of the turkey vulture: its history, its biology, its indispensable role in keeping ecosystems — and us — healthy, and what we can do to protect it.

References & further reading

Biology & natural history

• Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds — Turkey vulture species account
• Birds of the World (Cornell / Lynx Edicions) — Cathartes aura. Subscription required.
• Sibley & Ahlquist (1990) — Phylogeny and Classification of Birds. Convergent evolution in New World and Old World vultures.
• Stager, K.E. (1964) — "The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture." Los Angeles County Museum Contributions in Science.

Ecological importance & the South Asia collapse

• Prakash et al. (2003) — Catastrophic collapse of Gyps vulture populations. Biological Conservation 109(3).
• Oaks et al. (2004) — Diclofenac residues as the cause of vulture population decline in Pakistan. Nature 427.
• Markandya et al. (2008) — Counting the cost of vulture decline in India. Ecological Economics 67(2).

Threats & lead poisoning

• Finkelstein et al. (2012) — Lead poisoning in vultures and condors. PNAS.
• Slabe et al. (2019) — Blood lead levels in scavenging raptors during hunting season. PLOS ONE.
• Rattner et al. (2014) — Anticoagulant rodenticide exposure and toxicosis in raptors. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology.
• Migratory Bird Treaty Act — U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Organizations & resources

• The Peregrine Fund — Vulture research and conservation, including lead ammunition studies.
• HawkWatch International — Raptor migration monitoring and citizen science programs.
• eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology — Free platform for logging sightings; data used by researchers worldwide.
• National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association — Directory for finding licensed wildlife rehabilitators by state.