Ode to the Turkey Vulture

Turkey Vulture. Photo courtesy of the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

words by Katie Larson

My dad’s favorite bird was the Turkey Vulture. I asked him why when I was about ten, and he just said,  “They’re neat.”

He never went any further than that, but I tried to pull it from him, of course. How could that be the reason? “Neat” wasn’t a reason. Lots of birds were “neat”: Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, Northern Cardinals, American Redstarts, and Pileated Woodpeckers were local “neat’ birds. And then there were the birds of paradise, peacocks, Arctic Terns, quetzalcoatlus. Those definitely fell under that category “neat.” The Turkey Vulture was bald and ate roadkill.

But my dad would just shrug, and his smile would grow broader as I attempted to figure out how “neat” could be reason enough. 

He never researched Turkey Vultures or bought shirts featuring illustrations of them or named his golf clubs after them. He never told me about their powerful stomach acid or their white legs, streaked with cooling feces. He never tried to get close to them by staking out roadkill or by tracking them when we spotted them soaring above the nearby highway. He never displayed any predilection towards the birds other than to say they were his favorite. And he never defined “neat.”

My dad died in 2021. Cancer. 

I haven’t thought much about Turkey Vultures since then. Of course I keep an eye out for them. Turns out, constantly trying to pin my dad down on what he liked about them had built in me the habit of noticing them, black V’s descending, fingered wingtips upturned as they scented the dead in the high summer air. I will always look for them, in all likelihood. But I haven’t really thought about them.

But I do remember.

I remember the bike tour across Minnesota when I was twenty-one years old, riding through the center of the state, corn and cow, with my dad. I remember the climb up the rare ridge overlooking a shimmering lake whose name I do not remember. As we rounded a curve in the road, a Turkey Vulture, black as your shadow in strong sun, blew up from below us, coming so close, so quick, we could have reached out and felt fingers touching feather.

The author with her dad at the finish line of the Minnesota bike tour.

My dad, riding ahead, turned back to look at me, grinning ear to ear. Later at the rest stop, he would tell everyone about our encounter. I would smile and listen, learning how to tell the story when I went back to college in the fall.

I understood it then. I got it. How they could be his favorite bird. There was no need to know anything about their behavior, their demeanor, or their mating habits. I had seen the tough fuchsia skin of their head, tipped with a bone-white beak. I had seen the sky through their head, the dilated pupil of their tawny eye, steady and fixed.

I didn’t need more. They were magnificent. Powerful. Neat.