It's International Vulture Awareness Day!
Don't make that face, if I said it was international robin day, you'd be smiling.Vultures get a bad rap, but they perform a necessary service.I think they are kind of fascinating & like to draw them. The turkey vultures are common in Ohio, arriving every year in mid-March & leaving for warmer climes in mid-September. I see them perched on telephone poles all around the suburban neighborhood where I live. There's one ice cream stand where they perch on a high communications pole by a fire dept. & I always imagine they are eyeing my ice cream cone when I'm eating it at the picnic tables there. The turkey vultures are also called buzzards in Ohio, though they aren't really. European buzzards look like hawks. But a local radio station used to have them as a mascot back in the 1970's, calling itself "WMMS-Home of the Buzzard". The WMMS Buzzard abounded on t-shirts & bumper stickers all over town.
   I like to watch vultures fly, which is riding on thermals like eagles do. Except eagles hold their wings flat & turkey vultures carry theirs with a slight V as they soar. It's beautiful! They are so big, that if they go across the sun as they fly by, there is a huge shadow. My sister was with me once when that happened & said it was scary and prehistoric. Maybe that's why I like it?
    Anyways, I hope you'll join me in celebrating a strange looking and underappreciated bird today and maybe  not think so badly of them in the future.