Happy Father’s Day! Zorro, the educational turkey vulture at the
Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center, is now the proud
foster dad to a turkey vulture nestling.
Happy Father’s Day! Zorro, the educational turkey vulture at the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center, is now the proud foster dad to a turkey vulture nestling.
The bird was found along a trail in Carmel Valley and brought to the SPCA of Monterey County. Staff there attempted to reunite the healthy baby with its parents by returning to the site and placing it under the tree where its nest was believed to be.
The efforts were unsuccessful, as the parents never returned, and so the nestling went back to SPCA, where volunteers wore sheets, gloves and masks to feed the baby.
The cover-up was necessary to help prevent the nestling from imprinting on the human caretakers and to help cover up their scent.
To further the goal of keeping the bird wild, the SPCA sent out word to wildlife rehabilitation centers throughout California to see if anyone had another young turkey vulture that could be a “buddy” to this one. Nobody had an orphaned vulture. It’s an atypical situation as baby vultures are unusual patients at wildlife facilities.
There was some uncertainty as to whether a vulture, unlike birds of prey, could be successfully raised using anti-imprinting techniques designed for raptors.
Turkey vultures are not only intelligent and social birds, but they have a keenly developed sense of smell that other birds do not have.
Zorro to the rescue! WERC offered to have its resident turkey vulture stand in for the baby’s real dad. Though he is only 3 years old and has never seen a baby vulture since he left the nest himself, Zorro has proven up to the task. He doesn’t have daddy duties such as feeding and cleaning up after the baby (that’s a job for WERC’s hard-working volunteers). All he has to do is act as a father-figure to the impressionable youngster so that when it’s time to return to its native habitat, the bird will remain truly wild.
Check out WERC’s blog in this newspaper’s online South Valley Pets Blog for updates and photos on the baby’s progress.
Though it should soon be growing black feathers to replace the white down, it won’t be looking like Zorro for a couple of years. Until then, its beak will be black instead of white and its head will be gray instead of red.
This fall, when it’s time for him to “leave the nest”, so to speak, for the second time and return to the area where he was found, he’ll be rejoining his communal group, gliding with a six-foot wingspan in thermals (warm rising air) for hours at a time over the coastal hillsides and fields, and enjoying feasts of carrion.
