A venue of vultures

Yesterday morning, I got up again with Kevin and had a cup of coffee with him before he left for work. Then I got the kiddos up shortly after he left... at about 7:15am. Oh, boy, were they happy about that!

We went over to my folks' place to do some weeding in the vegetable garden. It was looking pretty good. Some serious weed growth between the rows, but that'll have to wait until Kev has some time to get the tiller out. I could do it, but it can wait. The tiller is a lot easier to run when you have long legs, long arms and hardy, strong biceps. A description much more fitting of Kev than myself.

We weeded for a couple of hours. Some stuff isn't doing so well... like an entire row of beets has about 10 actual beet plants. Some critter made a meal out of part of the watermelon plants. The peppers are kind of smallish. But the tomatoes are doing well, as is the corn. And the volunteer potato plants are flourishing. A small group of about 3 plants was covered in potato beetles, so I doused 'em with Seven. (When I see "organic vegetables" in the grocery store, I think "vegetables with bugs in 'em". Yummy.)

Anyway, we're not trying to have a pristine, perfectly weed-free garden or to win any awards with our produce. Just wanna have fun and work together in our garden, and then eat some stuff out of it.

On the way home from weeding, we turned onto our road (Joyce was driving), and there was a big group of dark birds in the road. I thought they were crows because I have seen a few large crows often on our road. But they were Turkey Vultures... a venue of vultures! Big ones, several of them in group in the middle of the road. When we approached, the ones in the road took off in flight, and then more took off, flying up out of the side of the road, the ditches and the trees. There was about 20 vultures in the air... I had already gotten my cell phone up to snap a picture, but I was too late... I caught only the last of them...



Turkey vultures are pretty common, in fact very common all over the U.S. (read all about it here). I have only seen them up close a couple of times in my life, and I think they are one truly ugly bird. Creepy ugly. It's also not uncommon to see 3 or 4 of them circling in the air (a kettle of vultures!). Probably the most I've seen in a group before yesterday was 6 or 7.

It was so strange to see that many of them together. And what was also strange was that there was nothing dead in the road nor along the road anywhere. I've never seen the like.

And then I discovered there is actually a Turkey Vulture Society. Hey, maybe that was a society meeting! Bunch of society vultures... cultured vultures!