Sultans of Serene

Amorphous and black and strange, turkey vultures roost in the cottonwoods along the creek, a presence of uncertain intent.  They take advantage of the morning sun, gray breasts facing toward light and heat and otherwise revealing not a thing.

No one bothers them here. The creek is a backwater, its significance easily missed. But its rhythms are a heartbeat, its connection to the great Connecticut recalled by ebb and flood as the big river changes direction. Today with the tide gone out, the sodden land provides an ideal place for scavenging, the sweetmarsh all flats and thin water and all the geese and most of the black ducks and mallards have hauled out. It could be one of them is dead or dying, or maybe some wayward sturgeon appropriately ancient and worn has come this way and fetched up at her final place. It is not clear if the vultures are already done or still waiting.  Only one seems to have muddy feet, a fetid brown wash over the native pigeon-pink - Except for the talons. These, gray-some, grew that way of their own accord. 

The business end of a Turkey Vulture, unlike the hunting birds of prey is not those talons which are relatively weak. It is Vulture’s beak, double curved for strength like a pre-stressed beam. As its structure implies it is a tool not a weapon attached to a pragmatically unadorned head. Prickly with what looks like hair shaved close it is cut this way to aid in cleanliness and keep them free of gore. Face-diving into a carcass you can imagine the mess that would cling to feathers, and vultures are meticulously clean. And efficient. Soaring high they can smell a dead mouse buried in the leaf litter far beneath the canopy; It is the small, unnoticed and left behind by others and therefore plentiful, which sustains them. Though bigger game, whether road kill or the deer some would-be hunter almost missed also plays its part.  For vultures, scale is not an issue and decomposition is an art.

With black robes billowing might they remind you of instructors of religion? Purveyors of inoculums, self-flagellation and Martyrdom, or suicidal mission? But appearances deceive. As easy to believe you regard the Misericordia of birds, veritable Jains, who only consume the remnant after the Life inside the form has moved on. What patience. Could I bypass all instinct and compunction to emulate their fastidiousness? Devouring only what is already dead, to live?

Look into those warm brown eyes, how they meet your gaze, how calm, how unafraid. Precise. Like punctuation at the end of the page.

March 13th, 2009 in Year Round