(Lampet-faced Vulture of Africa)
Wayne Grady in “Vulture: Nature’s Ghastly Gourmet” stresses the goodness of vultures and the need for people to protect them. He asks the basic question, “Why do people dislike vultures?” After answering that question, he persuades readers to change their attitudes towards these birds. Wayne Grady explains that ancient people had such positive feelings towards vultures that they revered them. In his book, the author instills these feelings in modern readers.
In the chapter, “The Value of Vultures”, Wayne Grady writes, “Why are the rest of us so down vultures? Some of the reasons are purely sensorial. Vultures stink. There is an air of the graveyard about them.” He continues, “Animals that eat food that, to us, smells bad, must in some wise be bad themselves. Most birds have no sense of smell, in itself an oddity; but some New World Vultures do have a highly developed sense of smell, and this fact to us seem even odder; why would a bird that can smell putridity seek putridity out and devour it? Vultures are our opposites, we smell rotten meat so that we can avoid it; they smell rotten meat so that they can find it.”
(California condor)
Two-thirds of “Vulture: Nature’s Ghastly Gourmet” is devoted to New World vultures with an entire chapter dedicated to the California condor. In discussing the mammoth effort to save the condor from extinction, Wayne Grady details the conflicts raging over the concept of “natural processes”. When the giant mammals that the condors fed on went extinct, the number of condors themselves started declining until the 1980s when only a handful of California condors were left. Naturalists asked each other, “Should people let the process of extinction continue or should they interfere to save this bird?” Wayne Grady ends the book with, “Perhaps now the lessons we have learned from these magnificent birds will help us to achieve a greater harmony with nature.”
This book has two major failings. One, the author concentrates mainly on the New World vultures. Old World Vultures are discussed only in the history section. Second, after rousing readers to action to save the vulture, Wayne Grady leaves them wondering just how to accomplish that.
“Vulture: Nature’s Ghastly Gourmet” encourages admiration for these unlovely animals. This book helps readers to understand the process of nature, including death and decay. Through this book, readers become more aware of vultures’ enduring value to people.
(Griffon vulture (Old World); Andean condor (New World))
Except from “The Value of Vultures: Vulture Families”:
“The Vulture’s ability to flourish on putridity has proven so beneficial that it has risen in nature not once, but twice, resulting in two independent and unrelated strains of vultures. For a long time it was thought that Old World and New World vultures were twin tines of one evolutionary shaft, both families---the Cathartidae (New World) and Accipitridae (Old World)---belonging to the same order, the Falconifornes, or diurnal raptors, birds of prey that do their preying during daylight hours.”
“In 1873, however, British anatomist A.H. Garrod proposed, on the basis of difference in the thigh muscles of the two groups, that New World vultures were actually more closely related to the order Ciconiiforn, which includes storks and herons, than they were to Falconiformes. Other anatomists found that vultures shared other features, such as the intricate pattern of their intestinal coils that were not shared by hawks. The only thing carthartids and falconids shared, in fact, were hooked beaks, and that hardly made them birds of a feather. In the 1960s, DNA studies confirmed the conjectures of the anatomists: New World vultures are more closely related to storks that they are to Old World vultures; the two vulture assemblages have, in other words, evolved separately, making the similarities between the two families, in the words of one biologist, “one of the more striking examples of evolutionary convergence to be found in the class Aves.”
Purchase this book as well other books on vultures from Amazon.com.
Va. Carper