Black
Vultures at Turner Creek
Three Black Vultures roost in a wet
tree, a dead wet tree, with
the
north wind blowing at them twenty-five miles an hour .
I sit nearby in the cabin
of a small sailboat in Turner Creek, a quiet tributary
of the Sassafras River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
I am
at anchor.
Where I am anchored there is a conflict between wind, tide
and the creek's current. Wind is from the
north;
tide ebbs to the northeast, floods toward southwest;
and the current which always sets northeast, but is overcome
by the tide twice a day. Sometimes in obedience to the tide,
sometimes the wind, and then
maybe the current, I am given a changing trapezoidal view.
Across the
table on which I write I look through the top of the companionway,
as
the boat swims and shifts to the forces playing on it.
For a moment it
was the clay cliffs west of Ordinary Point, then the
workmen's shed at the end of the road to Turner Creek Wharf,
then the
houses behind the trees northwest of this cove.In another
moment, I catch the slant of rain across the background of
trees and the soft
gray
sky,
then the dead tree with the black shapes thickening the upper
branches, the Black Vultures.
Earlier today, I saw them tilting in the sky and walking the
wharf. They are carrion eaters - not an elegant niche. Poets
construct
no
metaphors for eaters of dead flesh other than man. "The falconer
cannot hear the falconer,,," according to William Butler
Yeats. "One
hand, offhand, I hear the lark ascend..." according to Gerard
Manley
Hopkins. "When the red, red, Robin, goes bob bob bobbin' along." according
to Satchmo. I know
of no laudatio for the Black Vulture. And none
will be sung today It is gray, gray. There are no thermals to
lift the birds gracefully aloft, all flight today requires
wing
down,
wing
up, wing
down, wings pressing down, sucking up in the wet air.
Some
sense though of horizontal energy,the
swift move of the wind out of the north at twenty-five miles
an hour
- I used the blow to get here from miles west of here, I
sailed from
Gregg Neck - a righteous bird could ride this wind south.But
it is June,
southing is for later time. This is a time of staying still:
a nest,
a mate, progeny to carry something of you forward, make
something of
yourself history. Black Vultures do not as a species range
much farther north than here. Some are known to nest in Southeastern
Pennsylvania, but from here on north they are displaced
as the
dominant avian scavenger by the Turkey Vulture, red-headed,
longer-tailed and longer-legged. From here on southward
the Black Vultures outnumber their cousins - a Rebel/Yankee thing
I suppose.
Over near the Conowingo Dam across the Susquehanna River,
there
is a
big and noisy rookery of Vultures, Turkey and Black, that
get on well
together. Road kill along route 95, and the old
Baltimore/Philadelphia Pike, along the Pulaski Highway,
and the stunned fish churned through, and flung out downstream,
of
the
big
PECO hydroelectric generating turbines at the dam, create
plenty for
all.
The boat swings past, again, the three Black Vultures in
a dead tree.
My boat goes round its anchor, set in soft mud, that
is ground-down mountain, the left over from the first rising
of
the the Appalachians
before our time, before the time of ancestors of the
Black Vulture, maybe during the time when me and the vultures
had
a common ancestor.
That would be a half a billion years back, but mountain ranges
and their sedimentary outwash plains can be that long
ago -
muck with a pedigree. The common ancestor would be some reptilian
looking thing. I'd rather not imagine. But I like knowing that
me and
these
Vultures
are common creatures, connected, temporarily holding
fast in an old
landscape, in today's rain.
It is an early June evening, this rain that comes in
gray colors slakes me, feeds the meadow vole, the carp,
the possum
and
the rat
that are a sunnier day's dinner for the three Black Vultures
in the
dead tree at the mouth of Turner Creek.
Joe Ferry
