|
About This Author
Come closer.
|
Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
November 3, 2025 at 8:32am November 3, 2025 at 8:32am
| |
Finally! Someone gets it! From Nautilus:
You'll have to follow the link to see the lovely illustration of a vulture.
Vultures, hyenas, and other scavengers tend to have less than stellar reputations.
Yeah, well, so do certain politic- oh. Right.
If you see vultures circling, you can probably assume that some creature is nearing its end or has just departed.
Ugh. Wrong. And they were doing so well, too. Okay, technically, "you can probably assume" that, but you'd be wrong, too.
And they’re freeloaders: They don’t work for their lunch as much as the hunters of the animal kingdom do, they just steal the spoils.
That's not right, either. I mean, it is, in a way, but it's not like your moocher cousin who comes over and eats the food you were planning on munching on yourself. They clean up what the predators shun, and in doing so, they perform an important service. It's like the sanitation workers who clean fatbergs out of sewers: no one wants to be them, but someone has to do it, or things get worse for all of us.
It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that early humans may have relied heavily on scavenging, even after they had the tools to hunt.
It shouldn't be all that surprising. We don't have the strength or speed of some other predators, so it's reasonable to think our ancestors lived off leavings. What's not reasonable is to assume they did without evidence, and this article claims evidence.
Earlier scholars thought scavenging was too unpredictable, and already-dead animals too scarce, for it to be a frequent approach to finding food for ancient humans. And the risks—of attack from a lingering predator or of catching a disease from the rotting meat—would have been too great.
This is how science works.
The scientists also suggest that humans are, in fact, well adapted to scavenge: They have defenses that could protect against disease from carrion, such as a particularly acidic stomach to help kill off potential pathogens. And when humans learned to use fire to cook, that would have added another layer of protection.
Next question: was fire harnessed for that reason, or was it adapted to that activity?
The new work suggests that scavenging persisted among humans long after hunting emerged.
And whaddaya know? We still eat dead things. What? Eating live things is better? |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Robert Waltz has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
What? You've never heard of a Dumpster Diver? We have scads of scavengers who walk among us daily. Given the amount of food we waste daily, many have better diets than the general public. 
Comment • View 5 comments 
