V IS FOR VULTURE : A-Z Challenge

Welcome to Day 22 of the A-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is:

Wildlife Encounters

The thing about vultures is that it’s easy to focus on their looks and underestimate just how fabulous these birds actually are. Their importance in the food chain cannot be exaggerated.

Vultures act as a clean-up crew which helps stop diseases caused from rotting carcasses and they are fully adapted and designed to do just that. 

African White Backed Vultures on an elephant carcass 

It does however mean that they lack feathers on their heads. Some species also lack feathers on their necks too, (these are the ones that insert their heads inside carcasses to delve for juicy treats). 

Vultures’ abilities as scavengers rely on features like powerful beaks and talons and their ability to sniff out or spot a rotting corpse. These features are hardly endearing to most humans, but believe it or not, I do find vultures endearing. They are so perfectly adapted to do what they do, and there is something strangely sweet about a flock of these mighty scavengers waiting patiently for a hyena to eat its fill whilst also keeping watch to see if they can pinch a  morsel when the predator isn’t looking. 

Feisty, clever, patient and with incredible skills which enable them to reduce a dead animal to almost nothing, what’s not to admire about vultures?

Did you know that a group of Vultures is known as a ‘venue’ and when the group is seen in the air, circling together, it is called a ‘kettle’?

Apologies (again) for the picture quality – these are scanned photos from a Kenyan safari taken before I switched to digital.

See you tomorrow – I’m heading to two locations. The first is south of Kenya and the second is quite a long way east from there. Can you guess where and what the next animal will be?

If you want to blog-hop to the next A-Z Challenge blog, please click HERE