THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502250026
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 145 lines
WINGS LOCKED in a five-foot V, tail twitching to channel the wind, a turkey vulture sideslipped over the treetops and into range. Barry Bank snapped his Daisy BB rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.
The BB shot through 30 feet of air and a tangle of pine boughs. The vulture stiffened in midair, then flapped hard.
Bank studied its retreat. Like most of his past bull's eyes, this one brought only momentary comfort. ``It just hits the feathers,'' he sighed. ``It doesn't do any damage.''
He lowered the rifle and crunched toward home on the forest's white-flecked carpet of dead leaves. Dozens of new vultures wheeled and glided overhead. ``What you really need,'' he said, ``is an anti-aircraft gun.''
For five years, Bank and his wife, Joan, have waged war on a flock of the big scavengers roosting in the trees around their South Boston, Va., house. So far, they're losing.
The birds still swoop over the couple's hillside rancher each winter's evening, still circle ominously over the woods at the property's edge and land on the bare oaks scattered among the pines. After dark they hunch shoulder-to-shoulder on high branches - dozens, sometimes hundreds of them, perched silent and watchful.
Before flapping away each daybreak, the vultures do what all birds do, only they do more of it: Their droppings have whitewashed trees and great circles of forest floor. They have splattered the Banks' house, their cars, their yard and the Banks themselves. On a warm day, the woods reek of ammonia.
Added to this torment are the buckets of mess the birds regurgitate, their attacks on the family cat, their appetite for the roof's asphalt shingles.
Human ingenuity has failed to dislodge them. The Banks have shouted at their unseemly neighbors. The birds stare. They've shooed them with fireworks. The birds return. They've plinked away with the trusty Daisy. It's a waste of BBs.
And killing them is no solution, because vultures - bald-headed, putrid-smelling, carrion-eating buzzards - are protected by federal law.
No one knows what brought buzzards to South Boston, but there's no question that two species of the birds - the big, red-headed turkey vulture and the smaller but more aggressive black vulture - have burgeoned in the past few years.
From a distance they are magnificent animals, graceful fliers that can glide without flapping their broad, fingertipped wings for hours. Taken individually, they're handy to have around, dining as they do on the meat of dead animals that otherwise would be left to rot.
But both species sometimes socialize during cold months in groups of several hundred, and in such concentrations have raised hell throughout the state.
In many Virginia counties, black buzzards have forgone dead meat in favor of live cattle, attacking calves and cows giving birth. They start with the eyes. ``Then,'' said Martin Lowney of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Virginia office, ``they pick the animal apart.''
At the same time, several towns have seen wintertime buzzard infestations. Roosts have sprung up in Lynchburg, Appomattox, Hanover Courthouse and Vienna, and about 100 birds winter in Williamsburg.
Of all these sieges, South Boston's has attracted the most attention, thanks mostly to the noise the Banks have made about their dilemma.
Joan Bank first noticed the vultures in 1990, when the birds began circling the house and gathering in the trees. Soon there were hundreds. The Banks called the police.
Officers tried ``all kinds of noisemakers and apparatus like that'' to frighten the birds off, recalled Robert Fallen, the town's animal control officer. ``It ran 'em away while you were doing it, but of course the next day they'd be back.''
Undeterred, police blasted recordings of vulture distress calls over their squad car loudspeakers. ``It sounded like somebody wringing the neck of a chicken,'' Joan Bank said. ``I swear, that brought them in. We'd play that thing and they'd just flock to it.''
The birds began to make a mess of the woods, layering the ground beneath their roosts with droppings. The Banks fired starter pistols at them. Nothing happened. They lit firecrackers and bottle rockets. Nothing.
The couple brought in a louder weapon, a propane cannon that fired a blast of gas every 30 seconds during the early evening. That worked, until the vultures caught on that the cannon posed no actual harm.
The Banks had underestimated their adversary. The birds' brains might be little bigger than walnuts, but their instincts had been honed over eons in which nature had found it unnecessary to change them much. They were survivors.
``They'd leave for just a short time and come back, and sometimes they wouldn't even leave at all,'' police Lt. Rick Loftis said. ``Apparently they're pretty shrewd and pretty stubborn. They don't fool too easily.''
The Banks began to fret that the droppings might be dangerous - not a wasted worry, since bird and bat guano has been linked to sometimes-deadly disease. ``There are plenty of other things,'' Fallen noted, ``that you'd rather be around.''
So they called Lowney, whose office oversees the protection of migratory birds. Killing a vulture could bring a $5,000 fine, they learned, and end-running the law required a federal permit. The Banks applied for permission to kill four vultures, which they planned to hang in the trees, thinking that might scare the birds off.
The USDA granted the permit last spring, but by the time the OK arrived the birds had already dispersed for the summer, and the paperwork expired before they returned in the fall.
Joan Bank began to lose her patience. When she pulled up outside the house one afternoon, she found a vulture sitting atop a branchless tree in the yard. ``I saw him and I got so angry that I ran over here and picked up a stick and started beating on the tree,'' she said. ``And he regurgitated on me.''
None of this would be happening, the Banks reckon, if it weren't for the town dump. Just a few blocks away, it is popular with seagulls, gangs of which daily flutter onto South Boston's garbage. The Banks suspect the buzzards are drawn there, too.
City Manager Gary Christie disputes this. ``You never see them feeding at the landfill,'' he said. ``You never see the buzzards on the ground.''
One crackly cold morning last week, about two dozen buzzards were indeed perched on the ground and in trees at the landfill's edge.
Eyeing the landfill's roost was one South Boston resident who admires the scavengers. ``Ugliest damn bird I ever seen,'' landfill worker Michael Wilkerson said. ``But to me, they are just so damn cool when they sit there with their wings spread open.
``People complain about what they do to their cars and things. That don't bother me. I just get out with some soap and water and wash it off.''
The Banks are way past that point. Six weeks ago, black vultures swooped down on their dark gray tabby, Tut, leaving him with a gashed head and puncture wounds.
In a report he filed after visiting South Boston on Feb. 8, Lowney wrote that he saw 300 turkey vultures in the woods and recommended that the Banks be allowed to kill 15 of them. He left a permit application behind.
Still sore over delays that accompanied last year's application, the Banks aren't sure they'll bother. It'd cost $25, and only about a month remains before the vultures disperse for the spring and summer.
But the idea of trading in BBs for birdshot is appealing, Barry Bank will tell you. And it would be easy to nail 15 of the birds.
``If you had a shotgun,'' he said, ``you could point it up, close your eyes and you'd hit one.'' ILLUSTRATION: PAUL AIKEN/Staff color photos
Michael Wilkerson, a landfill worker, doesn't mind the birds. ``They
are just so damn cool when they sit there with their wings spread
open,'' he says.
Barry Bank aims a BB gun at a buzzard as he and his wife, Joan, walk
through their yard. He'd rather use a shotgun, but killing the
stubborn creatures is illegal.
by CNB