Expert: Julia Booth - 3/15/2009

Question
QUESTION: Are black vultures capable of flying while carrying a small animal of, say, 3 lbs in either their beak or their talons? If so, would this be normal behavior for them?

ANSWER: It's always easier for me to answer a question when I have some idea of why it's being asked.

A black vulture CAN carry a three pound animal in its talons and beak. But if it were in flight, it would carry it in its talons. The beak they use mostly for tearing flesh.

The thing is, the animal would already be dead. Vultures eat carrion, dead flesh. They don't attack living animals and carry them away.

So I'd say if you saw one that did, it wasn't typical and there must have been some special circumstances involved -like the bird possibly feeling its young were threatened, by the presence of said creature. That in itself is unlikely, since anything that weighs three pounds isn't much of a threat to such an enormous bird.

Hope this helps,

Julia

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I live on a farm south of San Antonio, Texas. Behind our house, we have a large pond on two acres, enclosed by an electrified fence, where we keep a few ducks and geese and chickens.  Four days ago, we saw a very large bird, unlike any we'd ever seen, sitting on top of a utility pole near one end of the pond. I went outside and walked to the base of the pole, but he didn't move. I'm sorry we didn't think at the time to take a photo of him, but he looked like some kind of vulture, based on his vulture-like beak, legs, talons, posture, and the gray mask on his face.  His feathers were black except for some white on the underside of his wings, which my husband saw when the bird flew away. I found pictures of black vultures on the internet, and they closely resemble this bird except that their tails appear to be more pointed whereas this bird's tail was squared off.  Also his mask didn't cover his entire head as most of those pictured did, only his face. Assuming that the bird was a vulture, we didn't worry about our poultry, but a day later, one of our ducks disappeared without a trace sometime during the afternoon. The time of day and the electric fence pretty much rule out a four-footed predator. It could have been a large hawk, one of which recently killed one of our chickens. In the past, when hawks have killed our birds, they fed on them on the spot, rather than carry them away. Anyhow, I recalled the strange black bird and, after reading some eye-witness reports of black vultures attacking and killing new-born calves, I began to wonder if the vulture (or whatever it was) could have snatched the duck.

Answer
Viltures have been known to scout for weak or injured animals, ones that might be near death, and kind of wait around for them to die -hence those old WB cartoons with the Vultures circling overhead and Heckle and Jeckle? LOL.

Given your location, I'm wondering if what you saw might not have been a Crested Caracara, which would be more likely to exhibit that behavior and are common in Texas. They eat carrion and are often found with Vultures. But they also eat live animals, like small rodents, reptiles and birds.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Polyborus_plancus.jpg/2

Let me know if this is it,

Julia