Stu and I were heading over the hills to Boonville for the County Fair this morning. Going around a curve, we scared a couple of turkey vultures off of a dead squirrel. Ponderously slowly, they flapped to gain enough altitude to clear the pickup's roof, and spotting another car behind us, they made a desultory circle above the road.
I considered the conundrum of road kill for a vulture. They came into a world long before roads. Wherever an animal died, they could find it and, once the predators left, eat it at their leisure. They never needed to develop the grasping talons and associated muscle/tendon complex that the hawks, eagles and owls rely on to capture and carry off their prey.
I'm guessing that nowadays, in many regions, road kill is probably a major food source for turkey vultures. So I'm wondering if over time natural selection might lead to vultures with grasping talons capable of moving at least a small critter to a safer dining room.
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1 comments:
Either that, or they add themselves to the road kill casualty list :o(
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