One morning in the middle of December of 2014, I was driving through the wooded and suburban Welsh Mountains located south of New Holland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. While moving along, I happened to see a half dozen black vultures perched handsomely on the roof and chimney of a house along the road I was on. I remembered, "oh, yeah, I had seen black vultures on that house before a few years ago" and they're still roosting there.
So this time, as I drove by the house a couple of times to see it and its yard from different angles, I counted 16 black vultures, six on the house, another four on the roof of a shed, five on a couple of trees in the yard near the house and one on the lawn. I didn't stop to count the stately vultures because I didn't want to alarm anyone, including those large, black birds.
I have seen mixed winter vulture roosts before of both black and turkey vultures, mostly in tall, planted coniferous trees in various forested valleys in Lancaster County and neighboring counties. The needled trees and hills of the wooded valleys offer some protection from cold wind to the wintering birds. But I never saw vultures of either local kind perching on a home and its adjacent lawn. I wondered how that habit started, and why it has persisted for at least a few years. I don't know and I am not going to ask the home owners to respect their privacy, and that of the vultures.
Turkey vultures have always been in Lancaster County in my lifetime. I saw them soaring high over farmland outside Rohrerstown when I was a boy many years ago.
But it seems that black vultures were relative newcomers to this area in 1974. I heard that a few those vultures were spotted in the Furnace Hills of northern Lancaster County during that year. Wanting to see that species, which would be for the first time in my life, I climbed the Cornwall Fire Tower steps as high as I could go a few times during October of that year. I never did see black vultures that autumn, but I did see migrating hawks going by that tower, which led to the Lancaster County Bird Club conducting hawk migration watches each fall from 1975 until 1988. However, I did see several dignified black vultures with turkey vultures on a winter roost in a wooded ravine near the Susquehanna River in southern Lancaster County and another mixed roost in conifers in a wooded valley in southern Lebanon County.
Black vultures and turkey vultures are devout scavengers and live abundantly in southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as across much of all the Americas, because of abundant farmland and dead farm animals discarded in the fields. Most every day in Lancaster County, one can see both types of vultures soaring and watching for carrion below. Both species have good eyesight and turkey vultures have an excellent sense of smell, which is unusual for birds. But that keen sense of smell enabled turkey vultures to find dead animals hidden from sight under the canopy of the forests that once covered this area and a large part of the Americas.
Groups of turkey vultures and black vultures roost in the Welsh Mountains during winter nights. And they pair off in spring to nest in those same wooded hills during the warmer months. All year they have easy access to croplands around those wooded hills, where they almost daily search for food.
Vultures keep an eye on each other as they watch the ground for carrion. When a vulture suddenly swirls to the ground, other vultures are alerted to the possible presence of a dead critter. The sudden traffic of vultures soaring earthward is a signal that spreads out like a ripple on a pond and vultures from miles around converge on the carcass to get their share of meat.
The two species of vultures in southeastern Pennsylvania, as everywhere, are interesting to observe. Especially when these adaptable birds roost so close to human habitation.
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