Vulture: The Beautiful Purifier

“Turkey vulture” is an unfortunately commonplace and dismissive name. Cathartes aura is the more impressive title given by science: the wind-borne purifier.

Vulture: The Beautiful Purifier

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Jack

The flight of a vulture is a beautiful thing. 

It is effortless, almost completely unreliant on the tension and labor of flapping—to say nothing of the clamorous combustion we rely on to lift our heavy engines. To fly as a turkey vulture flies is to glide and to sail. You wait for the sun’s heat to stir the night’s cool air into motion, and then you simply raise your wings, spread wide your hands, and feel the invisible atmospheric matter lift you upwards like a wave of wind-swept pollen. You ascend into the sea-light, that upper sea of massless color, to travel endless miles with no more effort than an occasional shift in pose to keep you in the center of those currents, those rising swells of air that form with the warming sunlight, that flow upward from the ridges, or that stream by in the great intercontinental pathways. 

There are no other creatures of the land to whom miles mean so little. For them, the earth has no obstacles. A vulture looks out, mountains and deserts lying before her, and feels no hesitation, no sense of daunting distance. She rises, sets her sails, and the long hours of a summer day exist only to be filled with that steady, silent passage.

Of course, you might object that this placid soaring is but one fragment of their existence, and much of even that time is mentally occupied by a less pleasant object—the constant search for the tangy, incipient odor of dead flesh. This seems like a distinctly unpleasant preoccupation to our senses, and one that becomes increasingly distasteful as we imagine the sequel: the detection, the approach, the furtive tearing apart of corpses, and the hurried ingestion before disturbance by raptor, coyote, or car. 

But what do we know of a turkey vulture’s senses? Obviously, their attraction to those dead bodies is not tolerance of something unpleasant, as it would be for us—it is the gratification of the searched-for object. That fundamental taste for cadavers on the verge of decomposition is not wrong and unnatural: it is the indication of their greater capacity for purification. We abhor the thought because their food would kill us, with our sensitive stomachs and fragile constitutions. Our senses are biased, but we at least have the capacity to intellectually understand this, to set aside instinctive repugnance for mental appreciation. Because mentally, rationally, and—in the great algebraic logic of the world—aesthetically, the feeding of vultures is also a beautiful thing. 

We glorify recycling, often beyond its ecological merits (commercial recycling is a highly partial recovery of energy predicated on a system of disposable wastefulness). Vultures are the foremost actors in the all-encompassing circle of nature’s recycling. There are countless small creatures who fill out the cast of this story, and they should be appreciated and celebrated. But no other animal approaches our vulture’s effectiveness at finding the world’s deceased and redistributing their matter, returning their cold carbon to the great reservoirs of life-to-be. 

“Turkey vulture” is an unfortunately commonplace and dismissive name. Cathartes aura is the more impressive title given by science: the wind-borne purifier. Once the original energy of the sun has been changed from plant to animal, any being is suitable material for the vulture’s cathartic conversion: insect or fish, mammal or man. They don’t work on the small, slow scale of maggots and microbes. Vultures come from the sky, sense their opportunities and obligations from impossible distances. They scent the call upon the wind and instantly assemble. And within a day’s short span they return the dead to life.