Talks With Vultures
Lisa Couturier
You must proceed there, that way, where today you are least at home.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The first thing you should know about Mattie Libre is that her surname, Libre, means, in French, “free.” Libre is not Mattie’s birth or married name; in fact, Mattie’s grown daughter suggested Libre as an appropriate moniker for her mother after Mattie divorced her first husband, who was convicted in the early 1990s for crimes of extortion against the U.S. government. Thus, the name Libre took on a somewhat double meaning. That is, Mattie was now free from a man who had betrayed the country that people the world over consider the epitome of freedom.
But soon after I met Mattie, at her house at the end of a mostly unpaved road in a wooded landscape in Virginia, I said that Libre was most meaningful not because of divorce or extortion, but for a more important reason. Whereas there are troops of lawyers employed to fight for one’s freedom in matters of divorce or crimes against the government, there is only one Mattie Libre; and she fights for the bird held in the highest disrepute by the general public, the bird most maligned and misunderstood. That bird is the vulture; and Mattie believes in the freedom of vultures.
In the early days of a so far sunny and blue-skied spring, two weeks before Easter, I park my car in Mattie Libre’s driveway, which runs alongside several animal enclosures. The vultures’ cage is at the end of a dirt path, set back near the woods, beyond the meticulously constructed and clean pens for the other animals currently under Mattie’s rehabilitative care: an assemblage of squirrels, several barred and screech owls, a red-tailed hawk, some seagulls, and several pigeons. Excited, Mattie leads me along the dirt path to introduce me to the injured black vultures and turkey vultures, birds whose digestive tracts contain acid strong enough to kill botulism and cholera. Once Mattie has restored the vultures to strength, they will fly off to serve again as proud members of America’s cleanup crew, our waste removal workers of the wild, a job similar to the garbage collectors of the human world, that highly paid position because, who wants to do it?
I have come to Mattie’s Libre’s place in the woods from my home near Washington, D.C., where, in the sky above the suburbs and the fringes of the city, black vultures and turkey vultures wheel and soar. They are the birds that, with a wingspan of five to six feet, several neighbors have mistakenly identified as eagles or hawks in flight. But unlike eagles and hawks, raptors that swoop down from the sky with outstretched talons to grab a fish or mouse out of its existence, vultures rarely do such things. In fact, whereas vultures historically have been included in the raptor family, there is now believed to be a genetic link between vultures and the stork family. Ancestry aside, turkey vultures and black vultures in America live a somewhat paradoxical, and to a certain extent precarious, existence: The rapid growth of the nation’s roads and highways, on which millions of mammals are killed, provide vultures a steady source of food; but those same roads open the countryside to development. When a vulture lays only two eggs each season, most often on bare ground; when the chicks of those eggs are born closed-eyed and helpless, and require care from both parents; and when the birth and care and raising of the chicks necessitates an isolated area of scrubby, shrubby fields in which to parent, then a new housing development or office park in the vulture’s landscape bulldozes the bird’s chances to reproduce. I find it useful to remember how often I take for granted the garbage collectors in my neighborhood, appreciating them only when, for some reason—a holiday, a snowstorm—they stop coming.
Mattie calls ahead to the vultures: “Hey everyone! What are you guys doing?” Standing before us are eight vulture rehabilitants dining on the heart, liver, and other assorted organs of a deer inside the twelve-by-twenty-eight-foot wood-and-wire cage, while twenty or more healthy, wild vultures gather at various places around the cage of those in recovery. Three of the wild black vultures drop from a tree and run along a path through the woods toward Mattie’s voice. In body and movement, the birds resemble the velociraptors in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; but unlike Spielberg’s vicious hunters, the vultures are comical, playing and nipping at one another like dogs vying for a rolling ball. Six other vultures balance on their long legs and spindly feet, seemingly tiptoeing, in a somewhat balletic manner, around the ribcage and legs of the deer splayed across the wire mesh atop the cage. The remaining black and turkey vultures perch in the huge bare trees of the property or swoop down for a swipe at the meat and then swing back up.
“They hear my voice and come in,” Mattie had said, somewhat shyly, yet proudly, when we began walking toward the birds. And I saw she was telling the truth. Circling overhead, vultures that likely had been uplifted for hours on the spiraling thermals of warm air above the earth, searching like novitiates for their idea of heaven—an animal’s carcass—began descending when Mattie called. Attired in their black plumage, it was as though little nuns and priests of the wild, missionaries preaching the miracles of their regenerative powers to turn rotten flesh into food, were landing around us.
The eating of a carcass—it is what repulses us most about vultures, as we watch them plunge their bare heads into a body on the side of the road. But if an animal’s service to humanity is a requirement for our considering them as necessary and important in our lives, then perhaps we must rethink the scene; and define more precisely the human and nonhuman characters roaming the altar of the earth. Imagine vultures as ministers, vultures sermonizing, for their human congregations, on the benefits of a purified landscape. Or ponder, even, the poetic nature of a turkey vulture, the way its Latin name, Cathartes aura, when loosely translated, transforms the bird metaphorically into a “cleansing breeze of light.”
Mattie does not call in the healthy, wild birds for her own pleasure, though to be sure she enjoys their presence: “I love two things, children and animals. The most undesirable animals,” she exclaims. “I don’t know why. Pigeons, possums, vultures. I take them here.” Vultures are social creatures, Mattie explains, which means they live in groups; and it is her hope that her rehabilitants, once they are released, will be allowed entrée into the vulture culture composed of the wild birds she calls in. Since there are only a handful of wildlife rehabilitators on the East Coast that accept vultures into their care, some of Mattie’s patients were delivered from as far away as New Jersey or South Carolina, rejected by rehabbers in the birds’ home states, where the birds’ original social groups existed. Much like crows, vultures roost together at night. Black vultures roost in groups that, depending on number, may fill a few trees, whereas turkey vultures might mix with black vultures or roost in a small family group. Whoever sleeps together, it is thought that vultures—again like crows—share the day’s news about food sources before they nod off. When morning arrives—and after the vultures’ wings are soaked in the sun for warmth and vitamin D—the birds head out to work, with those who went hungry the day before following those who were more successful in locating where the latest death has occurred.
When I wonder about how a vulture discovers death, I remember that I always fail in my own searches for the remains or discarded body parts of animals—shed deer antlers, say, or an old skunk’s skull in the woods.
Take a seat, then, if you will, on the wing of a turkey vulture that is in the sky searching for a dead animal below. From the bird’s wing, you cannot see what the vulture sees, especially at this distance, which seems to be inching closer to the clouds. Nevertheless, you peek through the vulture’s black fingers of feathers and see that on earth there are large tracts of green forest or beige fields, or specks of houses and roads and buildings, but not many specifics. To arrive high in the sky, the vulture has essentially opposed gravity by rising on an upward current of warm air called a thermal, which is heat rising off the earth. You are familiar with thermals and have seen them from a distance while driving, when, as the thermals rise a few feet into the air off a sizzling street, they look like water, like the earth’s sweat dripping off its body. But a vulture is more intimate with the atmosphere; and it is said that, once in the air, vultures have the ability to see thermals dancing deep into the sky. When your vulture, at a lower altitude, flaps its wings, it is seeing and seeking another thermal. But now, because your vulture is floating like a kite and wobbling only occasionally, there is a steadiness in its flight, a long and repetitive circling that could lull you, if you were lying on its wing, into a sound sleep.
Sleeping, you might miss the fact that above your turkey vulture there are, soon enough, soaring black vultures, birds that with their diminished sense of smell rely primarily on sight eight times greater than yours to find a carcass below. Black vultures tag behind the equally excellent-sighted turkey vulture because the turkey’s superior sense of smell lands everyone at the restaurant of death sooner rather than later. And so, with you asleep in its black satin sheets of feathers, the turkey vulture smells, from high in the air, through dense forest and canopy cover, a certain perfume of the earth, a cologne of blood and bones toward which it, you, and the black vultures begin to descend.
It was through what might be called the wildlife-rehabilitator grapevine of the greater Washington, D.C., metro area that I first heard about Mattie Libre. “She’s got dozens of vultures,” said one rehabber on the phone. “If you want vultures, get to Mattie . . . but . . . why, again, did you say you want vultures?”
A short answer to the question does not exist, though I knew, as I tried to come up with something, that had I truly wanted to explain myself it would be necessary to admit to having fallen in love with an old, inquisitive, and skinheaded Andean condor I had met years before along a dusty, windswept road deep in the heart of Chilean Patagonia, at the tip of South America. This was where, before I’d roamed into the condor’s life, I’d roamed through the lives of the more alluring animals in this edgy, daring, and virtually unpopulated landscape: guanacos dashing across the pampas, crested caracaras soaring over rolling hills, dolphins shooting out of the Strait of Magellan, sea lions lounging on glacier-edged inlets, and impervious penguins raising their babies in muddy dugouts amidst fifty-mile-an-hour winds. But of all these, it was the condor, the vulture, that stole my heart.
Not that this was the first time I’d seen an Andean condor. A few years prior to visiting Patagonia, when I was on a previous press trip in a remote Andean forest in the mountains of Ecuador, a condor just barely swept me under its massive wings as it was either flying toward or away from the group of us listening to our tour guide tout the richness of Ecuador’s environment. It was an incident that served to remind the tour guide to express, somewhat bizarrely I thought, his pride in a South American ceremony performed with an Andean condor. As I remember his details, a condor is hung upside down from a branch or a piece of wood while men riding on horseback gallop by the bird, punching it repeatedly with their fists, until the bird dies.
A story with such vivid imagery tends to spur questions, such as, For what exactly is the ceremony? Though desperate attempts were made to understand the behavior in the context of the life of a poor, rural South American villager—which meant searching for some hint of religious significance to it all—nothing of substance turned up. Ceremony, it seemed, was simply euphemism for one’s heinous participation in killing, viciously, brutally, and with total disregard for any notion of life, a defenseless vulture.
The mind, I think, tends to cache stories of such sadness deep inside the reference book of one’s memory, lest they lead to a hovering and conscious sense of devastation for the world, which, in all honesty, they probably achieve in the end, anyway. Whereby ultimately they become useful for a subsequent experience, when at a turning point you are searching for a certain knowledge about how to proceed. And you know the answer is there, somewhere, on one or another of the dog-eared pages of your life, where passages have been highlighted and underlined, often repeatedly.
This is what happened on that dusty, windswept road in Patagonia, when, as I was traveling, and deadly thirsty, I noticed a nearly blown-over sign advertising that up ahead was not only Coca-Cola, but an Andean condor as well. Patagonia, in places, has that frontier-town feel of the American Old West, which means you never know if the weathered, distressed wooden buildings you come across every seventy or so miles are inhabited by the local gun-toting cowboy, or, in the case of the condor, the happy old grandfather with a big white smile and a herd of skinny grandchildren grinning at the American: me.
I noticed the condor as I passed it on the way to purchase my Coke from Grandpa, who seemed not to speak English. The bird was strutting around its pen, which was the shape of a rectangle, at least thirty feet long and twelve feet wide, fenced in by chicken wire, on which, at the gate, loosely hung a box with the word donaciónes printed on it. An Andean condor is a big bird, weighing some thirty pounds and having a wingspan of ten to twelve feet. Keeping a condor means feeding a condor, which, being the type of animal it is, eats meat. The meat can be rotten meat the rest of us and most other creatures won’t touch, but is, new or old, food one assumes is rather expensive for humans to acquire only to then give to a condor.
“Mi amor, mi amor,” the grandfather babbled, as he drank a cold beer and as I, sipping on my Coke, walked around the perimeter of the condor’s cage, which was not at all covered, while the little granddaughters wove by me, running in their airy white dresses embroidered in colorful flowers.
The grandfather’s amor, or love, seemed not to be one of the grandchildren swirling around me but rather the condor, the large, powerful bird that, if it could fly on its black and white wings, could soar to heights of fifteen thousand feet. The powerful yet captive bird that could, in a free life, be purifying the Patagonian landscape of disease-bearing carcasses; the bird that could be engaged in courting; or be laying its one egg, which the female does only every two years; or be raising the chick of that one egg, a responsibility that both condor parents participate in for just over two years. Instead, the large, powerful bird that stood beside me was, sadly, engaged in absolutely nothing that it could otherwise naturally be doing. And the longer I stood there, on this wind-cutting day when the sky was, by late afternoon, a deep tangerine, the more I noticed that the condor was fond of rubbing its wings against the wire of its enclosure.
“Why doesn’t the condor fly away?” I asked the grandfather, hoping he might be able to speak a bit of English, and wondering why, without a top over the bird’s cage, the condor didn’t leave.
“Mi amor. Mi chiquito.”
“Your baby? Su bebé chiquito?” I asked in my broken and faulty Spanish. The condor was by this time following me with every change in direction I made, like a child playing tag, the outrageousness of which forced me to smile. When I stopped, the condor stopped and stood by me, scratching again against the wire.
“Mi amor. Oooh. Sí. Sí. Shush, shhh,” the grandfather said, slurping down the rest of his beer.
“Dónde está condor? Condor from . . . ?” I asked the man while the bird was now talking at me, even though condors, like all vultures, are technically voiceless. Lacking a syrinx, or vocal chords, vultures are said to only hiss and rattle, except when the male is courting a female and engages in verbal seduction of a gock, gock nature. But this vulture was making a wuff sound to me, something like a snorting puppy, while it stayed by my side.
“Sí, uff, uff.” The grandfather was watching carefully.
I started to think, then, of the Andean condor ceremony and asked, “Bird not ceremonia bird?” in my now pitiful English.
“Ahhhaa, aha,” the grandfather grinned, and sighed, “Mi amor.”
It was futile. I reached my hand through a hole in the chicken wire to touch what I knew was not only a magnificent and increasingly rare creature, but now a tame vulture. The condor wuffed at me again, rubbed against my arm, and then partially opened its wings and began an awkward and tumbling sort of run toward, I imagined, the tangerine sky, only to come up short just as it crashed into the chicken wire. It then gathered in its wings and stumbled about. This was the condor’s life now: the perpetually teasing sky; the hallucination of freedom.
“What does it eat?” I blurted out, angry and caught up in the maddening situation of the bird; angry and dreaming up some way to rescue the condor, momentarily forgetting that the grandfather did not speak English. There were no answers for this condor, trapped in its cage of loss and madness. Whatever the vulture had known before—in the pampas, the Andes, in its wild Patagonian places—it never would know again. The condor was caged by its own enormousness, tripping over its desires.
“Sí, mi amor, sí . . . shhh,” the grandfather said, seemingly attempting to comfort the bird. “Yeah . . . yeah,” the grandfather then said, turning toward me, “Ah, Buddy . . . come pollo, ah . . . chickens, eat lots-n-lots a chicken. Donacióne? Chicken mucho dinero!”
“Buddy?” I said, attempting to remain composed. “Never met a Buddy before,” I said to the grandfather, but more so to the bird, as I rubbed his wings and began searching my reference book of memory, the dog-eared pages of the mind, where the highlighted passages, the knowledge one seeks, might pop out just now. Was it right to pay this man to keep an Andean condor captive? How much more or less evil than killing a condor outright was this bird’s subdued life of subsidized torture? Would my donation be used to feed chicken to the vulture or beer to the man? Maybe the grandfather’s sweet-talking to Buddy was all an act. Or not, perhaps he truly cherished the condor in the same way I had, in this short time, become attached to it. Where is the page? Which underlined passage is the one?
Before leaving me by the vulture cage so that she can feed the baby squirrels sleeping inside the house, Mattie tells me about her mailman. About how fearful he is when he must deliver to her house boxes that, filled with mealworms, are marked “live animals.” About how the mailman hurries to her porch, hunched over the box, hiding his face for fear the vultures know he’s carrying food and will swoop down to steal the box, perhaps picking at the mailman’s tender skin and lithe muscles in the process. It seems not to have made an impression on the mailman that Mattie has told him repeatedly, in her effort to calm and comfort him, that the mealworms are for the small songbirds she rehabilitates. “But every time,” she says, laughing, “he hunches over that box!”
I think of the mailman while I watch the several wild birds and the rehabilitants tearing at the deer’s tawny-colored fur and bloody body with their hooked beaks. Beaks made for the hard work of ripping through the tapestry of bones, organs, and muscles that once, when the body parts were stitched together, formed the beautiful deer that ran in front of the car that hit it, which is how it ended up here, donated to Mattie from the wildlife officials of her local government. I notice, as I stand fairly close listening to the vultures grunt and lightly argue like dogs over who gets what to eat, that, similar to the mailman, I have my own unease. The unease of hearing the unsettling sound of the deer’s ligaments ripping, the unease of smelling the overwhelming cloud of blood that seems to hang in the air. Flies force their way around the vultures, as though buzzing with joy over the meal; still, none of it is especially easy to witness. Though perhaps this is one point: that the workings of the world, so wondrously evolved, are not necessarily meant to be easily taken in and understood. Some relationships in the nonhuman world may be less like the ease of a catchy Broadway tune and more like the complicated disharmonies of Miles Davis or Philip Glass; but, either way, we are witnesses and participants in the artistry of evolution.
One day in the future, when Mattie’s vultures are healthy enough to fly away—the one that was shot with an arrow, the other that was hit by a car and left on the side of the road, a third that arrived with a massive infection on its head—any of their lives would be a life that Buddy, the Andean condor, would have deserved. I watch the vultures dine on the deer meat that is not terribly unlike someone eating steak tartare or sushi. I smell the deer blood clouded in my nose and mouth; and its scent differs little from that known by any woman who, during the birth of her children, spilled carafes of her own red magic into the world. And I think of Buddy, and of the money I gave to the grandfather out of sympathy for a vulture that, sadly and forever, would be tame and easy to watch.
I leave the vultures eating and go to find Mattie inside her house, where I can gape at the tiny infant squirrels sucking down a formula of squirrel milk into their sweet, silver bodies. In Mattie’s living area, which is separate from the indoor rehabilitation facility, photos of her grandchildren and photos, drawings, and paintings of an assortment of animals—a crow, a raccoon, a possum, and a vulture, among others—splatter the walls. Mattie calls me to the back porch and pulls out an envelope brimming with photos of Clem, a black vulture that, when he was six months old, was delivered in perfect condition to Mattie. Perfect except in one way, which was somewhat similar to the way of Buddy: Clem had imprinted on humans when an infant, which meant Clem would come to understand Mattie as a mother of sorts or, more technically defined, as his “object of habitual trust.” With hard work, one can reverse a tame animal’s association to humans; but turning an imprinted animal back to a wild animal is a formidable undertaking, and nearly impossible. Nevertheless, Mattie Libre saw no other choice than to cleanse Clem of his humanness. “It was,” she explains, “the only way he could be free.”
Training Clem in the manners of a true vulture took four years. So young and attached to humans on his arrival, he spent his first year growing up and forming a skeleton of independence. The next year, Mattie released him not far from the house, secure in her belief that he would come back if necessary. Which he did, “every day that year,” she remembers. That also was when he brought home another vulture, and they became the duo Mattie called Clem & Company. She riffles through the photos to show me one of Clem perched on the riding mower while Mattie cuts the lawn, explaining that Company is in the woods, some distance away, waiting for Clem to cut loose. The next year, the third, Clem dropped by twice a month the entire year. He stuck by Mattie’s side on those visits, following her around the yard. He waited outside the kitchen window for her to finish her morning coffee. He played, as does a chimpanzee, with his reflection in a mirror Mattie set up in the yard. He tugged on shoes and on “anything yellow,” Mattie remembers. “He loved anything yellow.”
Then came spring and the changing light in the sky, when Clem flew off with Company.
A year passed.
Until “last Easter,” Mattie says. “He came back on Easter Day, but I haven’t seen him since.”
Mattie is a practical, wise, and caring woman; and she cautions me against making any mystical or spiritual connections between herself and what she does for these animals. “This is what I do. It is simple,” she says. “Someone else works at a bank. I do this. I am not special.” Still, I cannot help but file away the irony of a vulture, the so-called bird of death, reappearing on what is for Christians one of the most important and festive days of the year, the day of the Resurrection of Christ.
Though perhaps something less about the festivities of the human world and more about the revival of the wild world had triggered the return of Clem—who after a year away was by then a vulture fully attuned to the sky, a vulture sensitive to rising thermals, to wind, sunshine, rain, and night. Perhaps Clem was called by the season, by the ancient way it slowly massages forth life, something he felt as a blossoming of energy shivering through his feathers, the same energy mammals might feel in their fur, reptiles in their skin, and trees in their buds. On the Easter Day Clem returned, the sky—in its pink and orange light, in its air currents and temperatures—was much like a day the previous spring. And so perhaps at that point Clem flew back into the winds of his memories, where, like a petal trembling in his consciousness, there was something that made his life as a free vulture possible. If Clem’s had been a human life, his freedom would’ve been his turning point, the most dog-eared page, the most underlined passage of his story. And so though his return coincided with Easter, for the free bird that Clem had now become, it was more that the northern spring equinox had occurred and that, soon after, a full moon had lit the sky, and that somewhere, in all the beauty he had come to know, was a flowering image of Mattie Libre.
Mattie speaks now of Clem in the way a parent speaks of their grown children, as if all the difficult, exceedingly complicated, yet lovely eighteen years flew by in just a precious few seasons of celebrations, holidays, graduations, vacations, fun. And as she talks of vultures, of Clem, she looks toward the sky. Easter is almost here.
Lisa Couturier writes about nature in the urban landscape. Her essays weave together the fields of biology, psychology, spirituality, feminism, and philosophy to explore the complexities of the human relationship to the nonhuman. Couturier holds a master’s degree from New York University. She has worked as a magazine editor and an environmental journalist. Her work has appeared in the well-regarded American Nature Writing series, as well as in Orion, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, and in National Geographic’s Heart of a Nation: Writers and Photographers Inspired by the American Landscape. Couturier writes and teaches in the Washington, D.C., area, where she lives along the Potomac River with her family. The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape is her first book.