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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.
August 13, 2025 at 9:53am August 13, 2025 at 9:53am
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Sometimes you hear about people out wandering around doing idiotic things. The key here is that they're out wandering around. From Outside:
Selfies Don’t Kill People 
And no place has ever been ruined by an Instagram post, either. It's time to stop blaming social media for the world's troubles.
The article (an opinion piece) is six years old, published back in the Before Times. Since then, more people have had the opportunity to do something stupid in the not-so-great outdoors, like petting the fluffy cows at Yellowstone or slipping off the rim of the Grand Canyon.
No one has ever been killed by a selfie. A lot of people have been killed by stupid behavior.
I mean... technically? Sometimes taking a selfie is stupid behavior, like when you're at the edge of the Grand Canyon.
I don’t know if it was the poppies in California, or the tourists who died in the Grand Canyon, or the guy who fell off a cliff in Yosemite National Park, but it seems as if the social-media outrage cycle has come full circle. Now, rather than being mad at a dentist who shot a lion or a zoo that killed a gorilla, everyone is outraged at social media itself.
Okay, but look, hear me out here: there have been several Grand Canyon incidents.
What I tried to explain is that so-called selfie deaths aren’t anything new. There’s not been any sort of increase in the frequency of accidental deaths since the advent of Instagram or Snapchat; people have always managed to find stupid ways to die.
Fair enough, but with almost everyone carrying a camera around with them at all times, more people dying in stupid ways have been recorded for posterity.
Smartphones could stop working tomorrow, and a teenage boy will still find a way to put his life at risk in order to impress a girl, even if he can’t snap a photo in the process. The biggest change would just be that the rest of us wouldn’t see a photo of the shenanigans and would never get the chance to get outraged about it.
Outraged? Hardly. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, "I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused."
When people get the opportunity to visit a really cool national park, or a field full of beautiful wildflowers, or see a neat animal, it is only right and normal that they want to document the experience and share it with their friends.
I just saw one yesterday about a man in India who tried to take a selfie with an elephant, and the elephant chased him down, knocked him over, pulled down his pants, and stepped upon him. Guy survived, so it's not a "selfie death." But it was a pretty stupid thing to do, and I totally get where the elephant was coming from there. I like to think the beast purposely left him alive to teach him a lesson.
Again, this is not a new phenomenon. Are Ansel Adams’s photos of Yosemite Valley really that different from every Instagram photo every tourist snaps in the same spot?
Ahem... yes.
And just like Adams’s work, all those Instagram posts from Yosemite make people want to go visit.
This isn't the flex you think it is.
Finding a cool camping spot is no longer something that requires navigation skills; you just click on the geotag to open Google Maps, then tell that app to lead the way there.
Neither is this.
Social media represents change. New people from more diverse backgrounds can now easily reach massive audiences. Change can be scary but it can also be powerful.
There is indeed something new under the sun. The problem is that it's under the sun. I suppose it's possible that people have also died or been injured from taking selfies in the comfort of their own home, because one constant in the universe is the human desire to show off, but it seems to me that the problem is these people went outside.
With or without phone cameras.
Well, despite the age of the article, it's probably relevant again, because I see a stupid stunt death in the news at least once a month, maybe more. And again, my reaction isn't outrage. Sometimes, it's schadenfreude. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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