It didn’t take long for the news to take flight among Yukon’s birders this past weekend.
And when word reached Cameron Eckert in Whitehorse, he was soon packing up to make the five-hour drive to Mayo, Yukon, to see for himself. He hit the road the next day with a couple of other avid birders.
“You’re not going to drive to Mayo to see some birds,” admitted Eckert, president of the Yukon Bird Club. “But a black vulture — that just seemed next level.”
Black vultures have a huge range through North and South America, and they’re the most numerous vulture in the western hemisphere — but they’re rarely if ever spotted as far north as Mayo, at roughly the same latitude as Iqaluit. In fact, the species is typically not found anywhere in Canada, though Birds Canada says sightings have become more common in recent decades, in “extreme southern Ontario, especially along the Niagara River.”
As far as Eckert knows, the last time a black vulture was spotted in the Yukon was sometime in the 1980s, in the Kluane region. He says there have also been a couple of sightings in the N.W.T. over the years.
This one wasn’t hard to spot, once they got to Mayo.
“It was fantastic. We had good intel on where the bird was hanging out, basically right in the middle of town,” he said.
“There it was, on Sunday morning, hopping around yards, up on roofs, battling it out with the ravens and essentially doing what black vultures do.”
Black vultures are larger than ravens but with similar black plumage. They have a bare black head that distinguishes them from turkey vultures, which are larger and have red heads, and are more commonly spotted in the North. They mostly eat carrion.
“Over the hours I spent watching that bird, I thought it looked more and more attractive. It’s a very kind of fun, cute bird,” Eckert said.
Mayo resident Dennis Peter said the bird is “totally all the buzz” in town this week. He first saw it on Sunday and since then he’s kept an eye out and seen it several more times around town, often sitting on someone’s roof. Peter does not call himself a birder.
“But when you get a rare sighting like this, it’s hard not to be interested in it and see what’s going on,” he said.
“You gotta kinda keep your head tilted upwards because he likes high perches.”
Peter has even taken to carrying scraps of chicken and moose meat around, to leave for the bird to eat. Sometimes the ravens get to it first but Peter says the vulture’s eaten some of it.
“He hasn’t complained so far,” he said.
Known for ‘extreme wanderings’
It’s not clear how this hapless bird ended up thousands of kilometres outside its typical range, in a sub-Arctic community as winter approaches, but Eckert says black vultures are known for some “extreme wanderings.”
That’s especially the case with younger black vultures, he said, and this particular bird has a sort of speckling of brown feathers suggesting to Eckert that it’s probably a juvenile.
“They are known for getting astray and heading off in the wrong direction. So this does seem like a first year or a juvenile bird that’s just headed too far in the wrong direction and gone way too far,” he said.
Climate change may also be a factor, he says, though that’s less clear. While the species’ range has expanded northward in recent decades, that’s more the case in eastern North America.
It’s not clear what will happen to the Mayo bird now. Eckert says it might get by for a while, finding some dog food or other scraps around town to eat, but ideally it will soon take flight and head back the way it came.
It’s not exactly built for a Yukon winter, Eckert says.
“Like, it’s got quite long legs that are bare. They don’t have any feathers on their legs, and that bare head — this is not a bird that could tolerate sub-zero temperatures for any length of time. They just don’t have the thermal capacity for it,” he said.
“I sort of grew fond of that bird over the course of the day, and I really hope it gets turned around in the right direction and heads back south.”
Peter says people in Mayo are also rooting for their new friend.
“Everybody would like to see this bird survive and get home,” he said.
In the meantime, Peter says some residents have given the bird a name, like “Ted,” or “Baldy,” but Peter has not gone that far.
“It’s a bird,” he said.
