Keeping the neighborhood clean.

by Gary Gardiner | May 22, 2013

Turkey vulture devouring a squirrel is My Final Photo for May 22, 2013

Choosing today’s My Final Photo was quite easy. It had to be the turkey vulture in my back yard.

We’re not sure where the dead squirrel came from. There was no mourning for it. Neither would there have been mourning if the vulture’s meal had been one of the too many rabbits that plague the garden.

Still, there he stood in the corner of our small plot of land making a meal of a dead squirrel.

We’ve had hawks in the back yard before looking for the same prey only as living meals. For the vulture to find this single squirrel is interesting.

Vultures use their ability to smell decaying flesh, not their eyesight which is good but not as fine as the hawk’s. Even more interesting is that the vulture searches only for freshly dead animals, not the ones you and I can smell as they begin to decay. Vultures like their meat fresh, not rotten, just like us.