Distressed vultures are pulled from the water off Marathon. The Marathon Wild Bird Center took in the large flock of vultures on Monday, Jan. 23, after they had to be rescued.
Distressed vultures are pulled from the water off Marathon. The Marathon Wild Bird Center took in the large flock of vultures on Monday, Jan. 23, after they had to be rescued.
Contributed
A portion of some 60 vultures rescued off Marathon are shown undergoing rehabilitation in Marathon.
MARATHON — One local bird expert does not know what caused roughly 60 turkey vultures to fall from the sky above the backcountry waters off the Florida Keys, but it’s not the first time a large flock has dropped into local waters from the blue above the island chain.
The Marathon Wild Bird Center took in the large flock of vultures on Monday, Jan. 23, after they literally fell from the sky and had to be rescued by employees of the Dolphin Research Center and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The birds were found floating in the waters on the Florida Bay side of the Keys about a half-mile offshore off Marathon, said Emily Guarino, DRC’s director of research, training and data collection. The rescuers scooped the birds out of the water with large nets and brought them to the Marathon Wild Bird Center.
“The birds did not appear sick but were water-logged,” Guarino said.
Of the 60, five died of saltwater drowning, Marathon Wild Bird Center Executive Director Kelly Grinter said. Grinter conducted a necropsy of the deceased birds and none had a virus or disease and none had head or lung trauma, she said.
Many of the birds were kept under heat lamps overnight, and Grinter hosed off the saltwater from the birds and released them back into the wild in the past week.
Grinter and Guarino speculated that it could have been caused by a weather event. However, the National Weather Service Office did not have any reports or information about any severe weather in that area of the Keys at that time.
In the roughly 30 years Grinter has overseen the Marathon center, she has had large flocks of turkey vultures rescued from the waters off the Keys in similar situations, but this is the largest number in a single rescue, she said.
The prior events occurred in November, when the birds had migrated back to the Keys from northern areas.
A research paper published in 2000 in Florida Field Naturalist documented similar prior events with the turkey vultures in Keys and speculated that the birds may have been tired from migrating over large areas of water and fell from the sky out of sheer exhaustion.
On Jan. 23, 1990, the author of the paper observed a large group of turkey vultures approaching East Cape, the southernmost point of mainland Florida, from slightly west of due south over Florida Bay.
The birds were flapping continuously and “appeared to be in some distress,” the paper stated.
“Within one minute, the lead vulture landed on the derelict dock upon which the observers were standing (which extended some 10 meters into the bay) and immediately lay down, drooping its head and wings around the piling in apparent exhaustion,” the paper’s author, Randall Moore, wrote.
“Despite the proximity of the four observers (pilings were quickly occupied), whereupon vultures began to land on the beach to either side of the dock. None of the later arrivals showed the signs of extreme exhaustion exhibited by the first bird; they simply landed and did not move once settled.”
Of 96 vultures observed, 36 came in very low and landed on the dock and beach, 49 reached the shoreline with enough altitude to rise on thermals to approximately 50 meters before heading inland, and 11 birds came to rest in the water at distances of 5-300 meters from the beach, according to the 2000 report.
Of the birds that “ditched” into the bay, nine were ferried ashore in the observers’ canoe, one drowned and one swam with little apparent difficulty to the beach, eventually joining the other vultures above the high water line, Moore wrote.
Before their behavior was altered by the approach of the canoe, all of the birds were approximately half-submerged, but paddling quite strongly toward the beach with their feet with their wings slightly spread on the water’s surface.
At the approach of the canoe, Moore wrote, the first two birds attempted to escape and had to be extracted from the water manually. They were calm once aboard.
The remaining seven, possibly because they could see one of the first two birds perched on the gunwale drying its wings, made a frantic effort to clamber into the boat, eventually succeeding when the gunwales were rolled to water level.
“Upon our return to shore, one bird flew the final 20 meters to the beach while the remainder hopped out as the craft made landfall,” Moore wrote. “All eventually joined the birds that had landed there previously. Fifty-five minutes after the first vulture landed on the dock, all had returned to the air and flown inland.
“Conventional wisdom maintains that beach recoveries represent individuals that exhaust themselves after becoming lost or misdirected over water during inclement weather (e.g., poor visibility, strong unfavorable winds), but this fallout of turkey vultures indicates that some species incur mortality as a result of poor judgment during fair weather crossings,” Moore wrote.
