Livestock face growing threat from protected vulture spreading north amid climate change
Allan Bryant scans the sky while observing a minutes-old calf huddled under a tree line with its mother. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the calf stands for the first time on wobbly legs, trying to suckle.
Above, two birds circle in the distance. Bryant, hoping it’s not black vultures, is relieved to see that it’s just turkey vultures – red and not aggressive.
“Honestly, the black vulture is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They’re easy to hate.”
Black vultures, scavengers that sometimes attack and kill sick or newborn animals, were not previously a problem here. But now, Bryant frequently sees the birds after a birth. He hasn’t lost a calf in several years, but his animals have been killed before. So now he’s taking steps to stop them.
In some of his fields, he erects a kind of scarecrow – a dead black vulture – intended to scare away the birds. It’s a requirement of his depredation permit from the Kentucky Farm Bureau, which allows him to kill a few birds per year. The dead bird keeps the live birds away for about a week, but eventually they come back, he said.
It’s a problem that could get worse for livestock producers as the scavenging birds’ range expands northward, in part because of climate change. Advocacy groups have pushed for legislation that would allow landowners to kill more of these birds, which are protected but not endangered. But experts say more research is needed to better understand the birds’ impact on livestock and how their removal could affect ecosystems.
Warmer winters and changing habitats expanding bird ranges
Black vultures lived primarily in the southeastern United States and farther south in Latin and South America, but over the past century they began expanding rapidly northward and also westward into the desert southwest, said Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration.
Warmer winters on average, fueled by climate change, make it easier for birds to stay in places that were once too cold for them. Additionally, the human footprint in suburban and rural areas enriches their habitat: development means cars, and cars mean road accidents. Cattle farms may also provide a buffet of animals vulnerable to vultures learning the seasonal calving schedule.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from many different studies of birds, it’s that they’re very good at taking advantage of food resources and remembering where those things are,” Farnsworth said.
Although black vultures are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, they are not truly a migratory species, he said. Instead, they breed and some disperse to new areas and settle there.
How farmers reacted
After losing a calf to a black vulture a decade ago, Tom Karr, who raises cattle near Pomeroy, Ohio, tried to shift his fall calving season to later in the year in the hopes that the vultures would be gone by then. But that hasn’t helped: The birds stay all year, he said.
Until newborn calves are a few days old, “we try to keep them closer to the barns,” said Joanie Grimes, owner of a 350-calf cow operation in Hillsboro, Ohio. She said they had been caring for the birds for 15 years, but keeping them out of remote fields had helped improve the situation.
Annette Ericksen has noticed black vultures for several years on her property, Twin Maples Farm in Milton, West Virginia, but has yet to lose any animals to them. When they are expecting calves and lambs, they move the cattle into a barn and also use dogs – Great Pyrenees – trained to patrol the fields and barnyard looking for birds of prey that could harm the animals.
The size of their operation makes it easier to account for each animal, but “any loss would be seriously detrimental to our small business,” she wrote in an email.
Local livestock associations and state farm bureaus often work together to help producers obtain depredation permits, which allow them to cull a few birds each year, provided they keep track of them on paper.
“The problem is, if the birds show up, by the time you can get your permit and get everything sorted, the damage is done,” said Brian Shuter, executive vice president of the Indiana Beef Cattle Association. Farmers said calves can be worth hundreds of dollars, or even more than $1,000 or $2,000, depending on the breed.
New bill would allow farmers to cull protected birds with less paperwork
In March, lawmakers in Congress introduced a bill that would allow farmers to capture or kill any black vulture “to prevent death, injury or destruction of livestock.” Many farmers and others in the beef industry supported the move, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in July praised the House Natural Resources Committee for moving the bill forward.
Farnsworth, of the Cornell lab, said it’s not necessarily a good thing to make it easier to remove black vultures, which he said play “an extremely important role” in cleaning up “dead objects.”
According to Farnsworth, simply killing the birds could make way for more troublesome predators or scavengers. He added that while black vultures can leave behind bloody damage, current research does not show they account for an outsized proportion of livestock deaths.
But many farmers don’t want to do anything.
“They just eat them alive,” Karr said. “It’s so disgusting.”
