vulturefall

[corvi]

Yesterday, the turkey vultures came back. For months, there'd been no vultures, but yesterday juli saw one in the backyard, and then I saw one in the backyard and two on the way to the cell phone repair shop. It was like someone had suddenly thrown a giant knife switch from No Vultures to Vultures and they all just appeared. There was nothing gradual about it. 

Our vultures spend the winters in Venezuela. They're gliders, not really flappy endurance fliers, so they don't like to cross the sea until conditions are perfect. All the vultures from all their various islands congregate at the southern end of the Big Island and wait until the wind is good, and then they all launch themselves off to the mainland at once. Some October I'd like to go see them there, hundreds of vultures, spiralling over the stony beach, watching and waiting, a tower of wings and eyes. 

They must do the same thing on the way here, circling over the shore on the mainland, waiting and watching for the winds to open the way here. They crossed Monday, maybe. We saw one on the Big Island Tuesday, and now they're here on Salt Spring Island, all at once, like magic.

They have an extra tendon in their wings they can use to lock their wings open and hold them without exerting any effort, and they mostly find the places where the air rises and just spiral upwards there, for hours.

Watching them, you can see: there are huge columns of uprushing air, strong enough to lift a massive bird with a two-meter wingspan. They spiral around one column for a while, and then glide over to the next one and spiral there. If you watch them for long enough, you get the sense you're in an invisible structure of vast pillars, like a henge or a temple, kilometers high, made of air and warmth. It's eerie and incredible.

One of the columns rises from the rocky mossy ridge our house is perched on. The sun warms the rock, and the rock warms the air, and the air goes up and up, and the vultures circle above us. 

Yesterday the sky was gleaming blue, nearly cloudless. There were just a few faint streaks and smears of cloud, like the sky was a bright glass that had been cleaned rather half-heartedly. Looking up felt oddly like making eye contact with something. And then there were the vultures, new-arrived, sharp and ink-black - except sometimes a little gold where the sun comes through their feathers - sketching out the invisible architecture of the sky.