Top : Turkey Vulture; Bottom: Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture
Sometimes when people don’t understand or appreciate living things, they want to destroy them. Often they do this without knowledge of the species’ value to the environment. Consider vultures and sparrows.
Vultures are ugly. They eat dead things and they roost in groups that resemble scary Halloween displays. They look menacing, but looks can be deceiving.
Vultures are valuable scavengers that collectively form a global natural sanitation crew. By consuming dead animals, they keep the environment clean. If the mllions (billions?) of carcasses around the world were left to rot and fester, we would have far more serious disease problems than we do today. Vultures prevent the spread of dangerous diseases like Rabies and Anthrax by consuming the carcasses themselves, and by leading other wild animals to them, so the clean-up occurs quickly.
The ugly head of vultures is actually a smart adaptation to their lifestyle. Their naked heads remain cleaner than they would if they were covered with feathers when feeding inside of carcasses. It’s similar to doctors wearing rubber gloves for sanitation purposes.
Through a combination of an excellent sense of smell in Turkey Vultures and keen eyesight, vultures find and clean up carcasses all over the earth. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “The Turkey Vulture’s heightened ability to detect odors – it can detect just a few parts per trillion – allows it to find dead animals (even) below a forest canopy.”
Once vultures find dead animals, they not only consume them, but they sanitize them so they are not a disease threat. How? Ornithologist Van Harris wrote about this in his excellent 2012 column in the Memphis Commercial Appeal Vultures are Scary but Beneficial to Environment. “In fact, the digestive juices of vultures are so powerful that most bacteria and viruses are killed before they pass out of the birds’ digestive tracts. Vultures actually help control diseases in the environment by consuming animals that die of those diseases. Fortunately, Black and Turkey Vultures are now protected by law and allowed to help keep the countryside clean.” What vultures do for us is actually a fabulous free service. We should be grateful!
Sparrows to the unaware are drab, common, unimportant and unremarkable. China’s former dictator, Chairman Mao Zedong certainly did not care for them. According to John Platt, a writer about endangered species for Scientific American “One of Mao Zedong’s first actions after collectivizing agriculture was intended to protect the farms. Sparrows, he was told, ate a lot of grain seeds, so Zedong ordered the people to go forth and kill all the sparrows. During the Great Sparrow Campaign, as it has been called, hundreds of millions of sparrows were killed.
The problem with the Great Sparrow Campaign became evident in 1960. The sparrows, it seemed, didn’t only eat grain seeds. They also ate insects. With no birds to control them, insect populations boomed. Locusts, in particular swarmed over the country, eating everything they could find — including crops intended for human food. People on the other hand, quickly ran out of things to eat, and millions starved. Numbers vary, of course, with the official number from the Chinese government placed at 15 million.”
One of the hardest things for humans to grasp is ecology: the inter- relationship between living things and the environment. Animals and all species are here for a reason. They have important niches and belong to this planet as much as we do. In the words of William Kittredge in his powerful autobiography Hole in the Sky, “We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.”
