Black Death and Bad News

“Black vultures are one of the ugliest creatures I have ever seen and there is nothing good about them”

They are coming, and believe me, nothing seems to slow them down. They are non-native birds known as black vultures…an evil plague on the Ozarks. Black Vultures are compact birds with broad wings short tails and powerful wing beats, with white patches beneath the wings and coal black heads. They are carrion eaters but they also kill small mammals, including fawns, newborn calves, small pigs, baby sheep, cats and small dogs. They do that with powerful tearing beaks, eating the flesh before the creature they attack is dead. Their destruction has no bounds and along the White River in Arkansas, folks are being allowed to kill them without depredation permits. There are so many of them there now they are damaging docks along the river. In Texas seven hundred and fifty permits have been issued which allow the killing of black vultures any time, any place.

I don’t speak of what goes on in the outdoors from just what I read or what I am told. I have seen these birds, which have immigrated out of Mexico, and I have observed them and the things they do first-hand. I first saw about a dozen of them at the Bennett Springs state park a year ago and urged park officials to have them killed. They chose not too, and I doubt that anyone in the Conservation Department knows much about them. They won’t say much about them now, but they will in time, likely when it is too late to stem the tide.

I once saw 10 or 12 of those vultures attack a brand new red pickup in a Bull Shoals lake parking lot. They were pecking at it, hood and cab top and clawing at it with their feet. You tell me why; I have no idea. When they left it, they had done nearly 5 thousand dollars worth of damage to it. It was not an isolated thing.

A week ago at Houston, Missouri I saw about 20 or perhaps 30 black vultures roosting and on the ground off a highway, just a half mile east of the hospital. I have seen them in smaller flocks in several Ozark locations as far north as Truman Lake.

In time there will be thousands of them in the Ozarks and I am urging farmers and ranchers to kill all of them you can, and keep quiet about it. Use a .22 rifle at a distance and keep quiet about it. For some reason, some of the worst of the overpopulated big birds are protected by law and badly overpopulated, birds like great blue herons, cormorants and pelicans and turkey vultures too.

Eagles are getting to a point of overpopulation. What a laugh I get out of the MDC’s “Eagle Days” event, when city suburbanites are invited to different Department lands to observe eagles. Observe Eagles? Lordy, they are everywhere. Might as well have a squirrel day!

On some of the interpretive nature hikes I guide each year we pass eagle nests with young eaglets looking over the side of their nest at us as we pass nearby, and their parents circling above us, screaming a warning. A half-mile from my home there is a nest where eagles can be seen any time of the year, and in my explorations of lakes and rivers within 20 miles of my home as the crow flies I have found 19 active nests. I can photograph eagles any day of the week with little effort. There are tons of eagles now, as compared to my boyhood, when they were as rare as albino black bass.

I saw my first eagle floating the Big Piney with my dad when I was about 13. Didn’t see another one for years. In Canada, they swoop down beside my boat after I throw out yellow perch or small walleye, and they get only a few feet away from my camera. But eagles are as much a carrion eater as buzzards at times, and in this area they have become year-long residents because they feed in the winter on ducks and coots and fish and dead deer. You now begin to see them on country highways feeding on any kind of roadkill. They have absconded with ducks I have killed before my retriever could get to the dead duck and believe me if you have a small dog or a housecat, they are not safe if an eagle is close by. If you want to see eagles close up in the wilds, join me on one of my March nature trips to Truman Lake. We take up to twelve people at a time all day, and have a fish fry at noon. Or you can join the MDC folks on “Eagle Days” and watch them through a telescope. Right now the only thing easier to see than eagles, are squirrels, possums and armadillos.

Why is it that the birds we want to increase will not, like quail and woodcock, and even the rapidly diminishing wild turkey. Whippoorwills and Chuck-Wills Widows will be extinct in 20 years, and I think woodcock may follow. Read more about that in my Spring Issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine. Because of the ease of feeding young passenger pigeons, they could have continued to exist in bird sanctuaries 100 years ago, instead of becoming extinct. You know why we cannot do that with whippoorwills in the future? I will tell all about it in that magazine article.

Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613