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["Paul Woodward" <grackling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Paul Woodward
Fairfax City, VA 22032
grackling@xxxxxxx


>
> Beady-Eyed Stinkers Feast on Urban Fringes
>
> August 6, 2003
>  By JAMES DAO
>
>
>
>
>
>
> RADFORD, Va., Aug. 1 - The day the vultures arrived here
> was a moment made for Hitchcock.
>
> No one can say why they came. No one really saw them
> arrive. They were just there one morning last November,
> sitting in pine trees near the center of town. Hundreds of
> them. Black, beady-eyed and slightly menacing. Smelly, too.
> Roadkill smelly.
>
> "It would take your breath away," said Thomas K. Adams, a
> local farmer whose girlfriend lived across the street from
> the vulture roost. "A barnyard smelled clean by comparison.
> They smelled like, well, dead animals."
>
> Every day for five months, city officials battled to uproot
> the roost, exploding fireworks, spraying the vultures with
> water and finally chopping down trees. Nothing seemed to
> work. And then, as suddenly and weirdly as they had
> arrived, the vultures left, scattering one March morning
> like huge flocks of steroid-fed starlings.
>
> But they did not go far. Many of them are now in some woods
> nearby, nesting and lurking, and local officials expect
> them to try to retake the town in the fall. If they do
> return, like Capistrano swallows, the police intend to be
> ready with something more potent than a song: traps, and
> maybe shotguns.
>
> "We've got to do something, because they'll be back," said
> David R. Fields, a former marine who is the animal control
> officer for Radford, an Appalachian city of 17,000 in the
> New River Valley, near Roanoke.
>
> As development spills into rural areas across southern
> Virginia, vultures - aggressive, ugly, unappreciated - have
> joined white-tailed deer, coyotes, raccoons and skunks as
> animals unwelcome in the suburbs.
>
> Many ornithologists say Virginia has the second-largest
> vulture population east of the Mississippi, after Florida.
> Thanks largely to federal protection, the number is
> growing, though estimates are in dispute. Federal officials
> have put the number as high as 100,000. Conservationists
> place it lower.
>
> As vultures have multiplied, they have also spread into
> suburbs and even cities. Vultures, it turns out, like being
> near people, with all their roadkill, livestock and
> landfills. "It is one of the side products of urbanization,
> just like storm runoff and air-quality degradation," said
> Bryan D. Watts, director of the Center for Conservation
> Biology at the College of William and Mary. Several
> Virginia communities have roosts with 1,000 birds or more.
> Radford's is among the largest.
>
> More vultures mean more complaints. In 1990, the Department
> of Agriculture's office of wildlife services in Virginia
> received only two complaints of property damage by them. By
> 2001, the number had ballooned to 174, propelling vultures
> to third on the destructive-animal list, behind beavers and
> Canada geese.
>
> The complaints have ranged from the grisly to the bizarre.
> Vultures are known to swoop down on newborn calves and
> lambs, peck their eyes out and even kill their mothers.
> From 1997 to 2001, vultures killed or wounded 392 farm
> animals, costing farmers $133,305, the wildlife services
> office reported last fall. Black vultures are considered
> the main culprits, with less aggressive turkey vultures a
> milder nuisance.
>
> The buzzards have also attacked property, officials say,
> tearing off roof shingles, tractor seats and windshield
> wipers. Their droppings on transmission towers have caused
> power failures. For reasons that ornithologists have not
> figured out, they seem attracted to plastic and rubber
> items, like window gaskets and sheathing on power lines.
>
> At a boat landing south of Richmond, complaints about
> vulture damage to boats and cars became so common that the
> federal government killed nearly 400 birds there last year.
> But local officials say more than 200 birds returned this
> summer.
>
> Then there is the psychic damage. Martin Lowney, the
> director of federal wildlife services in Virginia, said a
> family in southwestern Virginia complained that vultures
> were perched on their father's gravestone every time they
> visited the cemetery. A woman reported that when she walked
> into a hospital room to receive counseling about cancer,
> two buzzards alighted on the window ledge outside.
>
> "She lost it," Mr. Lowney said in an interview.
>
> Citing
> concerns about the birds as nuisances, the Department of
> Agriculture asked the federal Fish and Wildlife Service
> last fall for permission to kill as many as 4,000 black and
> turkey vultures in Virginia. The request has been reduced
> to 1,300; the application is pending.
>
> The birds are protected under a 1918 law that restricts the
> killing of birds that migrate across national borders.
> Vultures once migrated between the United States and Latin
> America, though most of them in Virginia no longer travel
> more than a few hundred miles, experts said.
>
> Conservationists and ornithologists have accused the
> Agriculture Department of exaggerating vulture damage. The
> wildlife service has been steadily killing more vultures -
> 562 last year, from zero in 1997 - and critics contend that
> killing more than 1,000 birds in one year could decimate
> the birds in the state. They have demanded the government
> conduct a detailed census before allowing more to be
> killed.
>
> "They are consistently trying to scare people by telling
> them vultures can be vectors for human disease," said
> Gerald W. Winegrad, a vice president of the American Bird
> Conservancy, a national group. "In fact, vultures are
> demonstrated in studies to reduce disease transmission.
> They are nature's garbagemen."
>
> The Agriculture Department, however, says that vulture
> vomit and droppings may contain pathogens.
>
> James D. Fraser, a professor of wildlife science at
> Virginia Tech, a few miles from Radford, said that vultures
> breed relatively late in life, and that killing large
> numbers of adults could devastate the overall population.
> He recommends dispersing vultures by curtailing their food
> supply, through better disposal of dead livestock, game and
> pets.
>
> "Let's try to manage these things by finding out what is
> providing their food," Mr. Fraser said. "It's not all
> roadkill possum."
>
> Mr. Lowney said the government might not need to kill 1,300
> vultures. But killing even that many would not
> significantly reduce their numbers, he said.
>
> Farmers in southwestern Virginia have little patience for
> vulture sympathizers. They say they have been battling
> black buzzards at the Radford Army Arsenal for decades. The
> arsenal's roost was once thought to be among the largest in
> the east, with more than 1,300 birds. But many have been
> dispersing into the surrounding region.
>
> Chuck Shorter, 53, whose farm is over a ridge from the
> arsenal, said he had lost an average of three calves or
> lambs to vultures every spring for decades. "My field is
> like the local Hardee's to them," Mr. Shorter said. "They
> stop here for breakfast."
>
> Jim McDonald, 73, whose family has raised livestock in the
> New River Valley since 1763, said the vultures had become
> so brazen that he once had to use a stick to beat a dozen
> of them off a newborn calf. "People in Washington think
> we're terrible for wanting to kill vultures, but they
> haven't seen a baby calf with its eyes pulled out," Mr.
> McDonald said.
>
> In Radford, about five miles from the arsenal, officials
> have applied for a permit to kill vultures and hang their
> bodies where they roost, a practice that scares off the
> birds, experts say. But if that approach fails, the city
> may ask federal officials to take more extreme measures.
>
> Conservationists complain about an absence of public
> outrage about the killing of vultures, and they point to
> aesthetics as a reason. After all, the stoop-shouldered
> birds smell like ammonia, and vomit when threatened. Their
> feathers are puffy and unkempt. Noble-looking when carving
> lazy circles in the sky, they hop awkwardly on the ground.
>
> To the ancient Egyptians, vultures were emblematic of
> motherhood, and their images were carved into tombs to
> watch over the souls of the dead. But to many Americans,
> they are buzzards, bottom feeders and flying rats that
> carry disease and eat disgusting things - never mind their
> vital ecological service.
>
> "They're an easier target," Mr. Winegrad said. "If these
> were cardinals being killed, people would be going
> bonkers."
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/06/national/06VULT.html?ex=1061179919&ei=1&en
=bff6ee3f723f3e7c
>
>
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