An excellent feature of Turkey vultures is see-through nostrils.  That is, they lack a septum, so the opening to their sinuses goes straight through the top of their beak. This is handy for an organism which eats its meals with its head in the liquescent innards of dead things. With just a quick sneeze, any annoying clogging matter can be ejected. Also, the free passage of air into the sinuses enables the scent of lunch to be picked up even from an altitude of several hundred feet.

The pervious nostril can be easily seen in the photo above (by E. Shock).  If this vulture were chilly it would keep warm by pulling his feathery neck-ruff up to his ears by corrugating his forehead skin even more.

The “pervious nostril” is a characteristic of the New World Vultures (the Cathartids: Turkey, Black, and King vultures, the Lesser and Greater Yellow-headed vultures, and both California and Andean condors) and like their bare facial skin is a physical characteristic most likely related to their ancestry: genetic studies have shown they are possibly more closely related to storks than to the Old World vultures and other birds of prey.

It goes without saying that the pervious nostril, as being indispensable to the visual character of the organism, is always faithfully reproduced in Three Star Owl vulture items such as candle-holders (seen to the right, as well as in the Three Star Owl Shop) and a small vulture bottle.

Etymology: If you grew up calling Turkey vultures “buzzards” as many Americans do, you are using a word translplanted here by European English-speaking settlers.  There are no vultures in the British Isles, but there are hawks, which are called “buzzards”.  When newly arrived Europeans saw our big vultures circling overhead, they used the word they had always used for raptors.  The “Turkey” part of the common name “turkey vulture” comes from the fact that at a distance turkey vultures, which like wild turkeys spend a lot of time on the ground, look like turkeys, being of a similar size, with dark body plumage and having colorful bare heads.

Here’s St. George killing a dragon (which in this case is admittedly a very mammalian-looking scourge).  Note the size of the creature.  Most St.George dragon-slayer paintings show a dragon smaller than a horse, in the vicinity of a cave and peaks in the wilderness, not a giant dinosaurian Smaug-type scale-meister.

This observation is added to the arguments of the last post as meta-evidence of the vulture as dragon-source.  Also, it’s an excuse to post this fine painting by Raphael which has been a favorite of mine since childhood.

The allegory of St. George and the dragon is a Christian re-telling of the Perseus legend, which is no doubt a re-telling of an even older tale, wherein a young hero saves the people of the country-side as well as a king’s daughter from an evil plague in the form of a dragon.  For an odd version of this tale, identical in its iconography to the Raphael but almost Dali-esque in lay-out, check out Paolo Uccello’s St. George (ca. 1470):

The lady does not seem to need rescuing; she appears to be walking the two-legged monster on a leash.  I would put this very Jabberwocky-like anatomical configuration — two taloned legs and two wings — forward as a bird-like model for a dragon.  But using art as evidence can lead to problems: look at the colorful round patterns on the bat-like wings.  I do not propose that dragons and butterflies are generally considered related.  And what’s with the squares of turf, and bubbly spiral rising from the trees?  I’d say Uccello needed to get out more, except that there was obviously a lot of interesting stuff going on in his head…  By the way, “Uccello”, a nickname, came from the painter’s fondness of painting birds, and means “bird” in Italian (and, like “cock” has another meaning, according to online sources).

Click on either painting for a larger image.

The Uccello painting, which is in London’s National Gallery, inspired the U.A. Fanthorpe poem “Not my best side”.  It has nothing at all to do with vultures, but it made me laugh that such an iconic religious allegorical painting gave rise to such secular speculation — a perfect illustration of how art inspires without regard for artists’ intentions:

I

Not my best side, I’m afraid.
The artist didn’t give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn’t comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don’t mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

II

It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It’s nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn’t much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon–
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl’s got to think of her future.

III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can’t
Do better than me at the moment.
I’m qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don’t you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don’t
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don’t you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You’re in my way.

–U.A. Fanthorpe

A vulture blew up in a bisque kiln yesterday.  Dang!  And it was my own fault, too, a foolish, neophyte error: its body was hollow, and I forgot to make a hole in it for the hot air inside to escape, kerPOW.  The carnage is visible, right.  Fortunately, nothing else in the kiln was harmed.

Vultures have been on my mind recently.  Not only because I’ve been making turkey vulture items like the candle-holder that blew up, and the small “bottle” with the movable head in a recent post, but because of a show I watched recently on PBS.

It wasn’t about vultures.  It was called the Dragon Chronicles, and it was an episode of Nature with a genial herpetologist traveling around the other hemisphere finding examples of real reptilian organisms which shared some of the characteristics of dragons, to promote how each could have given rise to the existence of the legendary fire-breather.  It was a pleasant way of spending a TV hour, but the basic premise seemed a bit of a stretch because the narrator put forth several separate organisms rather than one as possible sources of the dragon legend.

I’ve got a different theory.  I think tales of dragons arose from encounters with vultures.  Think about these “known” characteristics of Dragons:  they are reptilian and large, with snaky necks, they fly, live in caves, horde treasures, are long-lived, wise, fire-breathing, and man-eating.  You can make a good case for each of these also being true of vultures:

Eurasian black vulture. Photographed by Julius Rückert.

Vultures are very large; in the Old World, the Eurasian black vulture of mountainous regions between the Iberian peninsula and Korea is one of the largest birds of prey in the world, massive by both bulk and wingspan (weighing in at nearly 30 lbs and keeping this heft in the air with a nearly 10 foot wingspan).  Its nearest competitors, the Lappet-faced vulture and Andean Condor, are also airborn giants.  With their bare neck and head, vultures are quite reptilian but, unlike modern reptiles, they can fly.  Their contour plumage is stiff and when a vulture rouses (shakes) to adjust disarrayed feathers it rattles like a scale-covered creature, often emitting scraps of fluff and powdery cuticle flakes from feather sheaths.  They lay eggs which are much larger than most birds’, and if broken, would have a baby vulture embryo inside, looking very dragon-like.  Many species of vulture roost and nest in caves and ledges, often in inaccessible peaks and cliffs, where their (to our noses) malodorous lairs are filled with a loose pile of sticks, droppings, and debris — maybe not golden treasure, but a heap of stuff for sure.  In the case of the European vulture-like raptor the marrow-eating Lammergeier (photo below), there are often bones on the ledge, enhancing its image as horder.  When approached too closely, a vulture will hiss loudly, and when pressed further, will sometimes disgorge the contents of its stomach in a forceful jet — like breathing fire.  This disagreeable material (remember they are carrion eaters) is acid enough to be corrosive. A fine deterrent to an interloper, this is also a way of lightening the load for flight.  Most vultures are long-lived, and there are records of Turkey Vultures living past 60 years in captivity.  They are “smart” in the way people mean it, because to some degree all vultures are social, interacting in large numbers at carrion and in migration.  As for man-eating?  Well, long bones in the lair could be interpreted as human by someone who only got a quick glimpse before being driven away by an enraged incubating vulture’s hot projectile carrion slush.  Grimmer still, in times when battlefields and other human casualties were not always swiftly cleaned up, vultures would have made meals of human dead.  As nature’s “Nettoyeurs” (remember Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita?) it isn’t uncommon even today for vultures to be blamed for deaths of livestock they didn’t cause, but were taking advantage of.

Lammergeier, photo by Richard Bartz.

I should add that there are also dragon-type creatures in the mythology of the New World, like the cliff-dwelling, human-devouring Piasa Bird of the Mississippi valley, and of course, Black Vultures and Turkey vultures live in the U.S., not to mention California Condors which had a range of nearly the entire U.S. in the times legend would have been made.  And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of New World vulture mythology; the King Vulture of Central and South America has a prominent place in the mythology of the Maya.

There’s no way to know for certain that vultures were the source of the dragon myth, but I find vultures to be the closest thing to dragons that I’ve personally experienced.

Right now most Vultures that breed in the U.S. are on their wintering grounds, in the far southern states and points farther south.  Even in toasty Phoenix, we won’t see them again regularly until spring, where as in so many places like Hinckley Ohio their return is celebrated on a specific date.  Here in central Arizona, it will be around the third week of March.  So after that, look up in the sky and see if you can Spot the Dragon.

To the right are Turkey Vulture Candle-holders from Three Star Owl (inquire for pricing).

Bonus fact about turkey vultures:  they have an excellent sense of smell, and I’ve heard that some Gas companies use a rotty-smelling compound called ethyl-mercaptan in their gas, to check for open-country gas leaks by looking for kettles of (frustrated!) vultures circling over broken pipeline.

Bonus bonus trivia about Lammergeier, from Wikipedia:

The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a stone – if this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.

The black and white photo of the very vulturine Dragon Bridge is by Barbara Meadows.

…that migration is quite the thing.

Our progressive Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano (now in Washington as Secretary of Homeland Security) hasn’t been out of the state for five minutes, and the conservative, small-government, small-minded cabal is already Brewing up trouble for our state’s educational system.

I am not a terribly political creature, and I don’t intend Three Star Owl to be a frequent political forum.  But I am posting two letters here.  Both deal with an appalling plan for gutting the entire state education system from Kindergarten through University in the name of fixing the current deficit in the state’s budget.  One letter is an e-mail sent to all faculty, employees, staff, affiliates and students of ASU by its controversial President, Michael Crow.  (I have never heard of a university president personally sending an email to every single person affiliated with a university.)  The other is a letter I emailed to our new Governor, Republican Jan Brewer, as well as to my state representatives imploring them to explore and enact different measures to shore up the economic health of our state.

President Crow’s philosophies and actions have not been universally popular during his roughly 7-year tenure as head of ASU, but under his focused and ambitious guidance ASU has advanced into the current educational decade and firmed the foundation for quality education for the rapidly growing numbers of Arizona students for decades to come.  They have also increased the financial contribution of the universities to the state of Arizona — just as supporting any major industry or business would — and that contributes to the economic health of our state.  Read his letter for its content, and consider it as being from someone who is both an expert in and close to the subject.  Keep in mind that this email only contains the effects of Pearce/Kavanagh on the universities of Arizona; there are also wide-reaching effects on secondary education as well, and child welfare issues, such as de-funding all-day kindergarten.
________________________________
From: Michael Crow
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 11:09 AM
To: DL.EMP.Faculty; DL.EMP.Staff; DL.EMP.AP;
DL.EMP.OtherAffil; DL.WG.ASUF.ALL.STAFF; DL.Student.All
Subject: Proposed Budget Cuts and the Future of Arizona

I am deeply concerned for the future of Arizona State
University. ASU has taken its share of budget cuts to help
the state deal with its revenue shortfall — and we are
prepared to do more.  But Senate Appropriations Chair
Russell Pearce and House Appropriations Chair John Kavanagh,
without considering the full array of options, have singled
out education for the largest cuts. Their plan would reverse
all of the progress ASU has made and set the institution
back a decade or more.
ASU has already taken more than $37 million in state
funding cuts and prepared for further reductions by
eliminating a total of 500 staff positions and 200 faculty
associate positions. We have disestablished schools and
merged academic departments while managing to preserve
academic quality.
On top of these cuts, the Pearce and Kavanagh proposal
would require ASU to cut another $70 million, or 35% of our
remaining state funding, in less than five months. Another
cut of $155 million is proposed for FY10.  Three of our past
legislative initiatives — the research infrastructure bill
of 2004, the Polytechnic campus construction package of 2006
and the SPEED construction stimulus bill of 2008 – would
be defunded. The cuts to our base budget are both cumulative
and permanent and to put them into perspective, they are
equal to:
•         A base General Fund budget reduction of nearly
40% from the FY08 level; or
•         Doubling the number of ASU students without
state funding to 40,000; or
•         Cumulatively reducing per student funding by
almost $3,200;

To deal with cuts of this magnitude, we would need to:
•         Layoff thousands more employees;
•         Have a massive furlough of all remaining
employees for two weeks or longer;
•         Increase tuition and fees; (replacing the cuts
by raising tuition alone would require a tuition rate of
almost $11,000 for Arizona residents)
•         Close academic programs.
•         Close a campus or possibly two.

Our Legislature has failed to live up to its
constitutionally mandated responsibility to fund education.
Borrowing funds, running a budget deficit (which Arizona is
constitutionally allowed to do for one year) and raising
taxes are not politically popular. But the alternative will
be even less popular – creating for Arizona a Third World
education and economic infrastructure.

We can use this deficit as an excuse to take a chainsaw to
vital public services or we can work our way out of our
current budget problems — exploring every option — without
sacrificing our future.  To that end, I will make ASU’s
economic and financial expertise available to our state
leaders.

You can read more about our budget situation and the
Legislature’s constitutional responsibility to fund
education at http://asu.edu/budgetcuts.  I welcome your
constructive feedback at
president@asu.edu<mailto:president@asu.edu>.

Michael M. Crow
President
http://president.asu.edu<http://president.asu.edu/>

Arizona ocotillo in bloom; photo E. Shock

Here is my letter, written to state legislators in response the information contained in the Crow email:

Gov. Brewer:

I can’t get a phrase out of my head: “Bomb ’em back to the Stone Age!”

This is what Pearce/Kavanagh would do: Bomb our schools and universities back to the Stone Age.

Arizona is in a fiscal crisis, and something has to be done, but please do not support this unfairly harsh hacking of our state’s education budget.  Other options must be considered and enacted.

EDUCATION IS NOT A LUXURY.  Don’t make Arizona a state where young children are poorly educated and higher education is merely the privilege of the wealthy.  Don’t decimate advances of recent years, such as all day kindergarten.  Education goes hand in hand with commerce: we need a well-educated workforce to attract and keep high-tech business in our state.  Above all, don’t balance the budget at the expense of Arizona’s students.

Why would our state government, which has an obligation to fund education, which should be PROUD to have a major role in supporting education, take such a short-sighted solution to economic shortfalls, and choose such a depleted and difficult path for our businesses and people?

There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by Bombing our schools and universities back to the Stone Age. Do not support Pearce/Kavanagh’s education cuts.

Allison Shock
small business owner
17th Distr. voter
Scottsdale AZ

If you are an Arizona resident and wish to express your views on the cataclysmic budget cuts proposed by Pearce/Kavanagh, use this link to find the names and email addresses of your senators and representatives.

If you wish to email our governor Jan Brewer, it must be done through the contacts page of her office, here.

Let’s hope, for the future of Arizona and its citizens, our state government arrives at a different solution to balance the budget than the short-sighted and irresponsible Pearce/Kavanagh plan.

Smart is the new mighty.

Here’s a link to the transcript of the Inaugural Address on NPR’s website. Better yet, hear the address as Pres. Obama gave it: there’s a link on the NPR page you can click on to hear him speak it. It’s strong, inclusive, thoughtful, and focused, and meant for all of us on the planet, not just Americans.

Click here to view the new White House website, including the White House blog.  Transparent government manifesting before our eyes.  And it’s not even tomorrow, yet.

Photo from Wikipedia.

Fortunately, I was able to hook up with V on her scouting trip this morning, and this is where we went: the dawn lift-off of Sandhill cranes just south of the town of Willcox, AZ.

Above is a photo of a small fraction of the cranes flying out from the ice-crusted ponds where they spent the night — something like 6 or 8 thousand roost at this place.  Dos Cabezas peak in the Chiricahuas is the twinned topography in the distance.  The sound the cranes make is as much a part of the spectacle as the sight of thousands of birds in wheeling lines overhead.  It’s an amazing noise, which I haven’t found an adequate way of describing.  A croaky sort of rattly trumpeting, continuous and amplified and multiplied by thousands of syrinxes, it’s mixed with the baby-piping calls of immature birds urging their parents to wait up, distinct above the stuttery honks of the adults.  (I’ve got a great video clip with the sound of the lift-off that I’m currently unable to get the editor to accept; I’ll post as soon as that struggle is over…)

An immature Golden eagle momentarily fools us all into thinking it’s intent on a crane on the fly, but it turns out to be adolescent high jinx and it perches on a power tower instead, after creating a fuss in the air, and setting most of the remaining cranes into flight.  Earlier, a handful of Chihuahan ravens hadn’t done as efficient a job of agitating everyone.

The cranes fly out to feed in the stubbly fields of Sulphur Springs Valley during the day: here’s a telephoto shot of a group working in a field with an irrigation pivot looking like a fence behind them.  They move slowly but steadily as a group, pecking the ground and occasionally each other, challenging breast to breast and vocalizing if necessary.  An occasional stick is brandished boldly, and there is some hopping about, with stick.  The immatures have brownish crowns, the adults a bright red heart-shaped “shield” between the base of their bill and their crowns.  Not visible in the picture, a big Ferruginous hawk lurks over the crowd, perhaps waiting for the probing bills to stir up a rodent, and American kestrels follow the foraging flocks as well. The cranes themselves often seem to follow the field equiptment, poking through freshly turned soil for goodies.  Horned larks work the furrows too, a Loggerhead shrike emits a variety of calls from a power line, and Eastern meadowlarks in large numbers stalk purposefully over the clods.  All of these birds, like the farmers, make their living off the soil of the Sulphur Springs Valley, and to some degree their numbers and even presence are due to agriculture.

In Willcox,  Land of the Cranes, they are everywhere: back at the motel, a solitary crane poses obligingly on the commode, but its stately blue silence has little in common with the mobile, gabbling gray thousands we’ve just witnessed.

For those of you within range of southeastern Arizona, consider visiting the annual Wings Over Willcox Nature Festival this weekend.  Held in the historic community of Willcox, this event celebrates the yearly return of tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes to the Sulphur Springs Valley in southeastern Arizona.  The rich Chihuahuan desertscrub and grasslands are slung between the Chiricahua Mountains and the Dragoon Mountains.  Patched with mesquite bosques, farmland, rangeland, and dotted with pools and ponds of semi-permanent and seasonal water, the Sulphur Springs Valley is winter home not only to the cranes, but to extraordinary numbers of birds of prey, sparrows and longspurs, waterfowl, shore birds including upland varieties, and other bird species people may not commonly associate with our region.  Scaled quail, Eastern meadowlarks, Bendire’s thrashers and Mountain plovers lurk in the wintery fields along with more expected Roadrunners and Gambel’s quail.  It’s a land of agricultural heritage — hydroponics and hay, and ranching, too.

This close to the event, many of the fieldtrips are filled, but check at the registration desk in the Community Center for last minute cancellations.  Also, many of the sights, notably the crane lift-off at Whitewater Draw and elsewhere along the farm roads in the Valley, are something you can do on your own.  The WOW organizers can give advice on where and when to go.

This year’s festival is the sixteenth annual WOW, and it’s the second year Three Star Owl has been in Willcox for the event, offering Arizona-specific table wares and sculptural items both funky and sensible.

Come visit “The Owl” at:

Booth 12, Willcox Community Center, 312 West Stewart Street, Willcox, AZ

Friday 16 Jan: 10am -7pm

Saturday 17 Jan: 8am – 5pm

Sunday 18 Jan: 8am – 3.30pm

more info at: wingsoverwillcox.com

Right: Small Turkey Vulture “Bottle” with detachable, posable head.

(3.75″ ht, $52)

Bird photograpy by Ed Bustya, “Sandhill Cranes taking flight”.

One of the most famous saguaro plunge stories there is tells of the death of a man with a gun plugging saguaros in the Arizona desert.  You’ve probably heard the story — a heartless gunman is killed by a saguaro he shoots until it falls on him.

I always suspected this tale was urban legend, but Snopes and other authorities confirm it as fact.  The shooter’s name was David Grundman and he and a room-mate were drinking and plugging saguaros in the desert by Lake Pleasant, northwest of Phoenix, in 1982.  They shot a little one, and then, inspired by how easy it was to get it to fall, Grundman began blasting away at a big one – reportedly 26 feet tall and estimated to be about 125 years old.  Damaged, it dropped a four-foot arm right on its tormentor, who succumbed under the weighty, spine-bearing limb; then, the destabilized main trunk went over too, also landing on Grundman. It’s hard to find much sympathy for someone who would do something so cruel and pointless (and illegal).  In fact, it’s hard not to root for the saguaro, although the loss of life in this story is sobering: two saguaros (or, according to one account, up to six were shot down where they grew) and one man. But, let’s face it, there’s karmic satisfaction in a cactus that not only defends itself, but gets revenge for the death of a smaller relative.

Having seen the carnage in our backyard resulting in a small saguaro falling on potted cactus, this story has new impact, and I have no interest in pursuing visuals, which must exist in some police records or other.

To offset that visual image, I’ve included a more nutritional picture I took in early summer of a White-winged dove poised to feast greedily on saguaro fruit in our neighborhood.  The fruits are green, bud-like pods (the dove is perched on one, and its flower stem).  After being opened by the doves and other frugivores like Gila woodpeckers, the exposed flesh of the ravaged fruits is red and flower-like.  The actual flowers, white and night-opening, are commonly pollinated by bats.  You can see a flower on the right edge of the photo.  They generously stay open during daylight for the convenience of bees, native and European.

On a lighter note (or at least, a musical note), the story of Grundman’s demise is immortalized in the Austin Lounge Lizards‘ competent saga “Saguaro” (which they pronounce suh-GWAH-ro, it must be a Texas thing), listen here: saguaro: “He grabbed his guns, he mounted up, he was off, to say the least…”

There must be something about Lake Pleasant.  That’s also the place where an inebriated man asked a park ranger to help him get a Gila monster, which he had tried to kiss, off his lip.  There’s another visual I could do without.

There’s an extensive account of the Grundman episode by Tom Miller, written as a biography of the victim cactus (Miller calls it Ha:san), in the chapter entitled “Saguaro” in the book Traveler’s Tales, American Southwest, by O’Reilly and O’Reilly.