By Margot Lester, TLC Trail Guide and Bluestem Volunteer
Turkey and black vultures play important habitat roles at all TLC preserves. But at Bluestem Conservation Cemetery (a TLC conservation partner), they provide environmental and spiritual support too.
Vultures were around before humans and they’ve been helping us ever since we came along. The earliest humans trailed vultures to locate food, and some anthropologists say following them encouraged people to migrate to new places. These days, vultures help us maintain a healthy ecosystem by removing carrion and reducing the presence of bacteria and germs. Their scientific family name, Cathartidae, is from a Greek word for “purifier” and the turkey vulture’s formal name, Cathartes aura, means “cleansing breeze” or “golden purifier”!
You’ll see two kinds of vultures here in the Triangle — turkey and black (Coragyps aratus, “vulture dressed in black”).*
Vultures in Indigenous & Black cultural traditions
Turkey vultures are featured in many Indigenous tales, especially origin stories, in which the bird flies high to move the sun and cool the earth, but is burned by the heat and comes back with a red, bare head and charred black feathers.
Here in North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee believes the turkey vulture created the hills and valleys of the Qualla Boundary and beyond. They call the black and turkey vultures “peace eagles” because the birds aren’t predatory like the bald eagles that frequently fly with them.
In other traditions, vultures are symbols of freedom and rebirth. Enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Black Atlantic, including North Carolina, often told stories of people turning into buzzards and flying off to escape their enslavers. (Buzzard is a European term for hawks and other soaring raptors. Settlers and colonists brought the term with them—applying it to any large, soaring bird—including Cathartidae. That usage became mainstream and folks still use the term “turkey buzzard” around here today.)
Vultures as escorts and messengers
At Bluestem Conservation Cemetery, we see turkey and black vultures around the preserve every day, including at burial services.
Though some people have negative feelings about these birds, for many others vultures symbolize guardianship and are important helpers for processing death, loss, and grief. In cultural traditions around the world, they’re one of the psychopomps, messengers between the living and dead, and/or “soul-carriers” that escort people to the afterlife. These entities take many forms, including other birds like ravens, crows, cuckoos, owls, sparrows and whip-poor-wills.
We appreciate the protection and connection these birds give our volunteers, visitors, and residents and we hope you will too. You can find more vulture facts on Bluestem’s Everyday Conservation page, including a downloadable fact sheet.
Now that you know a little more about the cultural importance of these compelling creatures, next time you see vultures flying high or attending to some roadkill, say a quick “thanks” for all they do.
*Both turkey and black vultures, and their cousins, California condors (Gymnogyps californianus), are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Vultures do migrate, but most are year-round residents in our part of the state.
Margot Lester is a TLC Trail Guide, certified environmental educator and interpretive naturalist from Carrboro. She received a grant from the Environmental Educators of North Carolina to develop interpretative materials on vultures for Bluestem’s Everyday Conservation program. Juanita Wrenn created the illustrations and designed a banner and fact sheets.
