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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.
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Little outside my usual box today; this year-old article is from Australia and, despite having spent my childhood on a farm and around farmers, I know little about the topic involved.
So the reason I'm posting this has more to do with my growing suspicion that Australia is not, in fact, trying to kill you; that's just the story they tell to try to keep Americans away.
Stuart Armitage is getting bitten by spiders more and more as the years go on, but he doesn't mind — it's a small price to pay for progress at his Queensland cotton farm.
Case in point. To hear the Australian Department of Keeping Americans Away tell it, even the tiniest Australian spider bite should be enough to send someone into immediate and painful cardiac arrest.
Prior to 1996 Mr Armitage would have had a hard time finding a spider in his paddocks or on many other Australian cotton farms.
So the story is really about reducing pesticide / herbicide use on Australian farms, but in the process, they've let their secret slip out.
The pesticide killed other life forms too, but with the invention of insect-resistant, genetically modified cotton – Bt cotton – the plant was able to produce a protein to kill the worm and spraying was significantly reduced.
It's also pro-GMO, which I appreciate (to be serious for a moment).
The industry's progress in this area and other others, including water use have been revealed in the latest independent review of the sector's environmental performance.
Do we do that in the US? I don't think we do.
Mr Kay expects herbicide volumes to drop as more growers adopt robots and cameras to spot spray weeds instead of applying blanket sprays.
Until the inevitable robot uprising.
That's it, really. I saved this entire article mostly to make an "Australian wildlife will kill you" joke. Still, the methods they're using are rather interesting; it looks like they were also able to reduce water use, which would be good anywhere, but especially good in a place that's mostly desert. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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