Lets give some love to the Bay Area’s underappreciated undertakers: turkey vultures (Cathartes aura). Though vultures are sometimes feared or described as ugly, they play an important role in our regional ecosystems by preventing rotting carcasses from spreading diseases. They use their amazing senses of smell to find freshly deceased animals up to a mile away. In fact, the turkey vulture has the largest olfactory (smelling) system of all birds.
The turkey vulture received its common name from the way that an adult vulture's bald red head resembles the head of the male wild turkey.
You can often find turkey vultures soaring over grasslands as they try to sniff out a carcass. These birds are very efficient fliers because they use thermals (warm updrafts) to carry them through the sky; they flap their wings very infrequently. The seismic geology in the Santa Cruz Mountains creates tons of thermals to lift a scavenging vulture at it searches for food.
