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Description:
The Turkey Vulture is one of North America’s largest birds of
prey, with a wingspan of 5 ½ - 6 feet. The feathers are brownish-black
with slight iridescence. The head and neck are bare, and the skin is
bright red or pink. They have a powerful, hooked beak. In flight, they
hold their wings in a slight V-angle (dihedral) with the primaries
separated, and their wings appear two-toned with dark gray flight feathers
looking lighter than the black wing linings. Males and females look
alike. Juveniles have duller brown plumage, and dark gray skin on the
head and neck.
Range:
Southern Canada, United States, Mexico, Central and South
America
Habitat:
Deserts, grasslands, tropical rain forests, and temperate
forests
Diet:
In the wild, they eat carrion. They prefer the carcasses of
medium-sized mammals, but also eat insects, dung, berries and fruits, and
carcasses of smaller mammals, snakes, and lizards. In the zoo, our
vultures eat prepared bird of prey diet.
Life
Cycle:
Turkey Vultures nest in shallow caves, on the ground in thick
undergrowth, or in hollow tree stumps and logs. They build little or no
nest. In North America, they lay their eggs in the spring or early
summer. They lay only one clutch per season, and the typical clutch
includes 2 white eggs with brown spots. A few eggs are pure white. Both
parents share incubation duties for 38-41 days. The young are semi-altricial
(helpless), with white down and a bare head. The down allows the chicks
to keep themselves warm from a very early age, and most parents visit the
nest site for only a few minutes each day. The chicks are fed
regurgitated food from both parents. They usually fledge after 70-80
days, and can live up to 16 years in the wild.
Did You Know?
·
Turkey Vultures are very important because of their feeding
habits – by feeding on carcasses, they prevent the spread of disease and
clean up the landscape.
·
The bare skin on the head is easy to keep clean when feeding
on carcasses.
·
Like other vultures, they have an enlarged crop for storing
large amounts of food. When a carcass is located, they can gorge
themselves and then survive 2 weeks or more without another meal.
·
They are one of only a few birds to have a highly developed
sense of smell, which plays a major role in locating food. Their sense of
smell has also been used by engineers, who placed ethyl mercaptan (the
odorous chemical in carrion) in gas pipelines to discover leaks. Leaks
along a 42-mile long pipeline were immediately located by observing turkey
vultures circling above them.
·
New World vultures look very similar to the vultures of the
Old World, but they are probably not as closely related as they seem.
Instead, scientists think that they look like the Old World vultures
because they are both adapted for the same way of life. Their closest
relatives are probably the storks.
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