"Does it only eat the dead, or does it make them?" the girl asked me at the Sallowby Crag signal post, and her mother laughed and then stopped laughing. I told her what I could say with confidence in early autumn: it eats the dead, and it is not fussy about how they got that way. The giant vulture crosses twenty-two feet from wingtip to wingtip. I know because in the first week of October one hung itself across a stretch of drying fence at Sallowby Crag, and I paced the rails with a surveyor's chain borrowed from the post. The bird is bald from the crown to a ruff of gray-white down that sits around its neck like a sagging collar. The skin of the head is the pink of boiled ham. It rides the cold updrafts above the pass from late morning, and in clear weather it does not flap for an hour at a time.
By November the weather turns and the habits turn with it. Fog sits in Wethermoor Gap for days, and the birds drop out of the air and walk. They are poor walkers, hopping sideways with their wings half open, like men carrying a table through a door. They gather on the carcasses of winter-killed goats and sort themselves by size, and the smallest eat last. Each one leaves behind a gray pellet the length of a forearm, packed with hair, hoof and bone chips. Herders read these. A pellet full of wool means the flock above has lost sheep, and they climb to count.
Elspeth Marrow, who keeps the signal post, gave me the local rule in a tone suggesting she had given it to many fools before me. A dead animal is never left lying on open ground overnight. It is dragged to the rock shelf below the post, where the vultures will take it, because a carcass left near a house draws them to the roofs. She says a roosting vulture fouls a thatch within a week and that the smell does not wash out of straw. She also says, and I cannot check this, that a giant vulture will circle a bedroom window for three days before a person in it dies, and that the birds know the hour better than the physician does. I have seen them circle many windows. I have not seen the other half of the claim.
In deep winter the birds sit hunched on the crags with their heads sunk, ruffs puffed, and quarrel over perches by hissing. One bird at Wethermoor Gap has spent a week evicting a smaller one from a ledge that is, as far as I can tell, identical to the ledge beside it. When a vulture lands in your yard, the herders say, stand still, keep your hands low, and drag the dead thing to the rock shelf by daylight.
- Classification
- Giant scavenging raptor
- Habitat
- High mountain passes and crags
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 22 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Beasts and Monstrosities
- Binomial
- Gyps colossalis
- Diet
- Carrion, mostly winter-killed livestock
- Temperament
- Patient, quarrelsome, wary of the living