Turkey Vulture

How to identify a turkey vulture

From a distance a Turkey Vulture looks like a big blackish-brown bird with long wings, a longish tail and a head so small it seems to be missing. Up close, adults have a bare, wrinkled red head and a short, hooked ivory bill — the resemblance to a male wild turkey's head gave the bird its name — while juveniles have a grayish head that reddens with age. The best mark is the flight: wings held in a shallow V and tipping side to side as the bird teeters on the wind, flapping as little as possible. From below, the flight feathers are silvery gray against black wing linings, giving a two-toned look. On the ground Turkey Vultures are awkward, hopping heavily and needing a hard push, a hop and several deep flaps to take off. Males and females look alike and are close in size.

• Small bare red head; grayish on juveniles
• Wings held in a shallow V, rocking in flight
• Two-toned underwing: black linings, silvery flight feathers
• Long tail extending well past the feet
• Pale, ivory-colored bill

Look-alikes

Range & habitat

Turkey Vultures range from southern Canada through the entire Lower 48, Mexico, Central America and South America all the way to Cape Horn. They live year-round across much of the southern United States, while birds from the North migrate long distances, some all the way to South America. Northern birds average larger than those in the tropics: Florida birds average about 4.4 pounds, Venezuelan birds under 3.5.

Turkey Vultures favor open and semi-open country with woods, cliffs or rock outcrops nearby for roosting and nesting: farmland, pasture, rangeland, foothills, desert, roadsides and the edges of towns. They generally avoid unbroken forest but can sniff out carcasses beneath a canopy, and they regularly forage along shorelines and over small offshore islands. Communal roosts in dead trees or conifers can hold several hundred birds, sometimes mixed with Black Vultures.

Through the seasons

Diet & life cycle

What it eats

Turkey Vultures eat almost nothing but carrion and prefer animals that died recently over rotting ones. Roadkill, dead livestock, washed-up fish and winter-killed deer are typical, along with fish and tadpoles stranded in drying ponds, the odd insect and, rarely, decaying plants; they almost never kill anything themselves. They find food by sight and by smell, picking up ethyl mercaptan and other gases released early in decay with an unusually large olfactory lobe in the brain. That nose lets them find carcasses hidden under a forest canopy, and Black Vultures, King Vultures and condors, which lack the long-range sense of smell, often follow them in. As the story goes, a Union Oil worker noticed vultures gathering where gas laced with that odorant leaked from pipelines, and in the late 1950s ornithologist Kenneth Stager confirmed in field tests that the birds home in on the smell.

Life cycle

Turkey Vultures build no nest. The female lays one to three eggs, usually two, cream-colored and blotched with brown or lavender, on the bare floor of a cave, cliff crevice, hollow tree or log, dense thicket or abandoned building. Both parents incubate for about 30 to 40 days and feed the chicks regurgitated food. Threatened chicks hiss and vomit, and adults at the nest may flee, vomit on the intruder or play dead. The young fly at about nine to ten weeks, and family groups stay together until fall. Turkey Vultures roost communally year-round, scattering to forage alone or in small groups during the day.