राप्टर Return of the Turkey Vultures

Ohmygod, they're back!

The magnificent, graceful, utterly awe-inspiring turkey vultures are back.

I've been awaiting their return since March.

Otter saw a couple of 'em yesterday, but forgot to tell me about it. This morning, while out picking philodendron and papyrus starts from the yard, I saw a bird shadow pass me. A really big one. Then two more in quick succession. I raised my eyes and had to have been looking at about 30 or 40 vultures in flight, circling right over my little neighborhood. Nearly hyperventilating, I called Otter to tell him that I'd spotted turkey vultures, and lots of 'em. When I got off the telephone and went back outside, the vultures had been joined by about a dozen short-tailed hawks, all of the raptors circling past and through each other, the hawks's 3-foot wingspan looking positively diminutive next to the vultures' impressive 6-foot reach.

Their numbers continue to grow.

I'm popping back outside between every sentence or two to keep an eye on the birds. There are easily 50 or 60 vultures and maybe 2 to 3 dozen hawks up there at the moment. The cats are keeping low down. The chickens are fussing at their clutches, trying to keep their children together and hidden and as safe as they can be, under the circumstances.

The vultures, though...oh the vultures!

They slow Time.

They pass through Space like no other bird, as if they had claimed these patterns and passages long before humans ever even thought to notice Sky.

They are Divine, not just in their aesthetic magnificence, but in their utility as carrion eaters, as ferrymen for the Dead. They are absolutely awesome, in the weightiest sense of the word.

They are beautifully, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly perfect.

---------------------------------

"...and the Signifieds butt heads with the Signifiers,

And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words,

When across the sky sheet the impossible birds

In a steady, illiterate movement homewards."

-Joanna Newsom, "This Side of the Blue"

----------------------------------------------

I sing this every time I see the vultures.

Every time.

When I've got a head full of pomposity and narcissism, I watch the vultures;

watch them do the things we are too squeamish and self-important to do;

watch them gracefully and unselfconsciously fulfill their genetic proclivities;

watch them make it look like God.