Buzzard Day

What the day is

Buzzard Day is observed on March 15, marking the spring return of turkey vultures. The best known version of the tradition belongs to Hinckley Township in Ohio, where the birds' arrival has been marked and counted on this date since the 1950s, with the organized public celebration held on the following Sunday.

Origin and background

The name is a misnomer that crossed the Atlantic. In Britain a buzzard is a hawk, and settlers applied the familiar word to the large soaring birds they found here, which are vultures and not closely related.

What makes turkey vultures remarkable is smell. Most birds have a poor sense of smell and hunt by sight, but the turkey vulture has an unusually large olfactory system and locates carcasses by scent from the air, often under a forest canopy where nothing is visible from above. They are tuned to ethyl mercaptan, a compound released early in decomposition, which means they find a carcass while it is still fresh rather than after it has rotted.

That ability had a practical industrial use. Ethyl mercaptan is chemically similar to the odorants added to natural gas, and pipeline operators have historically injected it into lines and then watched for circling vultures to locate leaks along remote stretches of pipe.

Their flight is equally economical: they soar on rising air with wings held in a shallow V, rocking in a characteristic tilting motion that lets them cover long distances with very little wing beating. The bald head, often treated as ugly, is functional, since feathers repeatedly pushed inside a carcass would be impossible to keep clean.

Their digestion is equally extreme. Stomach acid strong enough to destroy the bacteria behind botulism, anthrax and cholera lets them eat what would kill most scavengers, which is precisely the service they provide. That service was demonstrated catastrophically in South Asia, where vulture populations collapsed by more than ninety percent in the 1990s after birds fed on cattle treated with the drug diclofenac. Carcasses went uncleared, feral dog numbers rose, and human rabies cases rose with them.

How to take part

• Watch for the shallow V shape and the rocking flight that identifies them at distance.
• Read about the South Asian vulture collapse, which shows what scavengers are worth.
• Never use lead ammunition where scavengers feed, which poisons them.
• Visit a spring vulture return event if one is held near you.
• Remember they are vultures, not buzzards, whatever the day is called.