Circling Vultures Overhead and Disgust

[April 10, 2025]  I always had a disgusted view of vultures. They feed off carrion, flesh of the dead, and circle overhead in search for the dead and also the living who are about to die. My Dad told me many stories of the American Civil War, about the battles and the carnage left behind. Many of those stories were about the vultures that feed off the bodies of soldiers and other animals killed on the battlefield.

I was particularly disgusted by these stories of vultures feeding off the dead. Perhaps I was overly sensitive to the emotion of disgust because being so sensitive prevented me from discovering more about the Civil War, remembering the tales of my many relatives who fought in that war, and how to deal with it in the right frame of mind. But the story of vultures and their place on the battlefield never went away.

One story, for example, involved the Siege of Vicksburg, where many in the city died of disease or starvation. The vultures were “as thick as flies on a dead calf.”  Other battles, too. Vultures were always present and in the tens of millions because there was “food” – i.e., carrion – about the entire theater of war, and food seemed never to run short. “There were so many vultures they blotted out the sunlight.” My young mind could not wrap itself around the idea of being eaten by a bird.

War is a brutal and universal exercise in human behavior, and certain animals have taken advantage of the carnage that followed the clash of opposing warring sides. How did my Dad know all this?  In part, there were stories passed down from our relatives who were told of the horrors of battle and the aftermath by kin folks who served during the war. For example, my great-great-grandfather Basil had a younger brother who was a color-bearer at the Battle of Gettysburg and who was fond of keeping his grandchildren entertained with graphic tales of war.

When hunting birds or squirrels with my Dad, he would point out the circulating vultures overhead and say that there must be a dead animal nearby. And then we would look for it, and often it would be a dead deer, and look up to see if this is what the vultures were after. I was never taught much about the types of vultures except they were ugly and disgusting, and that’s all. But my brother and I did learn to tell the difference between vultures and buzzards, the latter only looking for fresh meat.

I remember the first time I saw a vulture up close. While hunting dove with my Dad we unexpectedly walked up on a group of vultures snacking on a dead dog. The large size of the vultures took me by surprise and momentarily scared me. They were all black except their red, bald head and all looked at me like I was going to be their next victim, or so I thought. With my Dad beside me, it was easy to stand my ground. I wanted to shoot the birds on the spot, but my father told me about the important function they have in nature, and so we just walked away. The thought of shooting those vultures returns whenever I see one sitting in a tree or flying overhead.

I can still picture in my imagination the swarms of vultures coming down and eating soldiers killed on the Civil War battlefield and how I found the idea so very troubling. Just yesterday, I saw vultures circling a wooded area near my home, and they brought these memories from long ago flooding back. I don’t like vultures, and my improved knowledge of them has not changed my mind.

When our family moved to Texas in 1966, we were in a different climate, and I thought that meant the end of those nasty vultures. I would be surprised to find they lived there, too. My maternal grandmother had traveled to Arkansas in a Conestoga-covered wagon in the early 1900s and had commented to me about all that she’d seen, yes, including those pesky vultures. I just couldn’t rid my life of them. Ugly? Yep. Disgusting? Yep.

————

Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).