The Great Backyard Bird Count is our next birding adventure (February 16th to the 19th)!
Come to the February 13th meeting at the Robert J Parks Library, 6010 N. Skeel Ave., Oscoda, to learn how easy and fun it is to participate!
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This month: Meet the Ospreys and a new date for Birds of Alaska! See you there.
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Join us at our next chapter meeting, when Conservation Manager Kylie McElrath comes to speak about Black Tern Conservation and Iosco County's Small population of the threatened bird.
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www.facebook.com/share/p/1G1hjG8rHn/I'm back.
You'll see me this week — a dark shape wobbling overhead on wings held in a shallow V, rocking side to side like I might fall out of the sky at any moment.
I won't.
I'm a Turkey Vulture, and I just flew 1,500 miles from the Gulf Coast to get back to your highway corridor. I followed the warming thermals north, rising on columns of heated air without flapping, covering 200 miles a day on almost zero energy.
You'll see me with others. We travel in kettles — dozens circling together in rising air, climbing until we peel off one by one and glide toward the next thermal. From below, it looks lazy. It's the most efficient long-distance flight system in the bird world.
I don't kill anything. I never have. I have no talons strong enough to grip prey and no beak designed to tear living flesh. I eat what's already dead.
Last year, Turkey Vultures removed an estimated 12,000 pounds of carrion per square mile in the eastern US. Carcasses that would have spread disease, attracted scavengers to roadsides, and contaminated groundwater.
I don't do this for you. I do it because dead things are food and I can smell them from a mile away.
But the result is the same.
Your roads are cleaner because I came back.
You're welcome.
#TurkeyVulture #SpringMigration #NaturesCleanup #BackyardNature #RaptorFacts #WildlifeReturn
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