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Edmund Jaeger (1887-1983) http://tinyurl.com/EJaeger

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Turkey Vultures

From Desert Wildlife, 1950.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

The solitude of the California desert can be summed up without words by the image of slow, circling vultures against a clear blue sky.

Edmund Jaeger, a naturalist and botanist, describes the gathering of turkey vultures in the Mojave desert, an iconic image that has become a familiar emblem of the desert itself.

In the morning before sunup the vultures are so crowded on the dead branches of the tress that their black-feathered bodies are plainly visible from a distance of half a mile. There may be hundreds of them in a single roost. Sometimes one large tree may hold as many as thirty or forty birds—six to eight lined up close together on a single horizontal limb. As the sun comes up, they turn about, fluffing their feathers and stretching their wings one at a time. . . . Then, one after another, they sluggishly take off, joining others in that slow, cyclic flight that continues without interruption all through the day.

By nine o'clock every bird is in the air in the eternal gliding that carries them around and round like autumn leaves in a slow-moving whirlwind. We see them move in ever changing circles tip to heights almost beyond human sight and gradually down again.

A renowned naturalist of the Southwest, Edmund Jaeger published Desert Wildlife in 1950.