Recently I wrote about the unfortunate demise of a small bunny in my garden. I’m not sure what the cause of death was, but I suspect it’s related to the smallness of the bunny, because a number of smallish likely predators scout the place, and a coyote would have taken it away. By the time I happened on it, crows were busy redistributing portions of it into the birdbath. Various guts appeared on the edge of the raised concrete beds, prominently, like a warning to other stray abdominal tissue to stay the hell away. It was a situation.
So, I reasoned that if I was allowed to put chicken bones in my yard debris container, I could put the bunny in there too. After all, people eat bunnies.
As it happens, that was not the correct thing to do with my ex-bunny. I looked it up. I looked it up, in fact, in time to rectify the situation, but the critter was buried under two feet of yard debris and I wasn’t of a mind to dig for it. The garbage company has not reached out to me about it and it’s been a week, so I think I’m in the clear.
What I was supposed to do was triple-bag the late lagomorph in plastic and put it in the garbage can. This offends my plastic-avoiding soul. I’ve been reusing the same ten Ziploc bags for years. The reasoning behind the egregious plastic use is to prevent offensive odors from fouling the neighborhood before garbage day, which is valid, although I have a flowering plant that does exactly that.
There are a number of interesting items in the city code website. For instance, I am under no circumstances to bury a cow, horse, or other large deceased animal in the city limits. This situation doesn’t come up often, but I made a note of it. I could bury a small animal on my property, and burying it the yard debris bin doesn’t count. Also? I am never to spit on the sidewalk, even though there is no designated loogie zone provided. I am never to burn clothes in any burial ground in the city, or scrape a skeleton. You wouldn’t think such a thing would come up often around here, but, speaking of offensive odors, I once observed a neighbor tanning a deer hide in a boiling vat of her own urine right across the alley. (I was fascinated.)
I am responsible for the prompt lawful disposal of any carcass on my own property although the city will pick it up if it’s on public land, which is why you occasionally see squirrel squirtage skid-marks down people’s driveways and into the gutter. The county website adds: “We encourage finders of deceased animals to be as specific as possible to describe the location and nature of each find, position relative to the curb, and any bags or containers used, as face-to-face clarifications with officers are to be avoided as much as possible.” I don’t know what this is about, but perhaps the occupation of carrion-scooper attracts a sociopathic element.
But wait! What’s this? Right in the middle of the what-to-do-with-your-dead-animal page is a whole section just about bunnies. Apparently I was supposed to contact the Oregon Department of Agriculture, which is tracking the spread of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus 2. Honestly. I messed this up big time.
That’s about it, except I was pleased to run into the word “deadstock,” as opposed to livestock, and the following question on a forum: “I found a large dead animal in my compost. Can I still use it?”
No. It is no longer in operating condition.
Reminds me of the time that a vulture died in my yard. It was much too large for me to bury (we have tree roots compacting the soil here, as we have lots of trees.) I called to ask what to do with the body, did they want to take it or what. They told me to just put it out in an off to the side location in a park, and let nature take care of it. So that’s what I did. In retrospect, however, I wonder if the vulture had eaten an animal, like a mouse, that had been poisoned. I hope that whomever ended up eating the vulture didn’t die from it.
Eww. A distinct possibility. Seems like the odds of running into a dead vulture in your yard are so low. Hate to think it would end up doing in all the other vultures. Or do they draw the line at eating vultures?
I’m somewhat of a roadkill aficionado, mostly trying to identify carcasses or flattened objects as I drive past. Vultures were once uncommon in NJ, but with the explosion of the deer population you can’t look up without seeing one, five or twenty of them. It used to just be turkey vultures, but apparently they sent out an invite to the black vultures when the carcass bonanza began and now we have two resident species.
Back to your question, will they eat their own? Dead vultures used to be uncommon roadkill and I never saw them eating their own. Now I may see a few vultures as roadkill each year, but still haven’t seen them eating a vulture. It may be that deer are just more common and are more worthwhile picking over than a skinny bird. Or it may be that they prefer mammal roadkill to birds. Canada geese are ridiculously common and I see a few of those as roadkill each day, but never attended by vultures. Anything with fur though gets picked over pretty fast.
OMG! It used to be that turkey vultures were prevalent in this area. Since a little before the pandemic, I noticed that Black Vultures outnumbered Turkey Vultures around here. I googled them, and found out that they prefer the heat of the south. I hardly ever see turkey vultures anymore. I postulate that climate change has made each of these species travel north. What do you think?
I don’t know, but I was about to say if there was ANYTHING that had to do with stinky old carcasses that we got wrong, Bruce Mohn would be around soon enough to set us straight. Thanks Bruce! I’ve never seen a black vulture here. Only saw some in W. Virginia. Maybe nobody including turkey vultures wants to eat vulture because they poop and pee all over themselves and although that’s fine as a WARDROBE choice, no one want it on their plate.
Around here, between the gulls and the corvids, dead stuff like roadkill seems to disappear rather quickly. I recall being driven around by a work colleague, a rufty tufty type, who nevertheless was grief-stricken at accidentally running over a suicidal rabbit. By the time we had found a place to turn around (a matter of a couple of hundred yards) and returned to the site of the incident, all that was left of the rabbit was a red stain on the tarmac and, perched nearby, some rather smug gulls. However, large carrion eaters like Great Skuas and Great Black-backed Gulls didn’t fare so well during bird flu though.
Wow. I do know that if you’re planning to dump your crab bait at the end of an expedition, you throw it in the air near the gulls and it will never hit the water.
A herpetologist buddy of mine knew a guy who had two eight foot alligators in his basement in the city of Philadelphia. That was very much against the law.
One of them had the bad manners to drop dead during the hotter part of summer.
The guy considered options and finally decided to line up a bunch of his similarly minded buddies and one night before garbage day they gathered up the two hundred pound gator, carried it down the block and threw it into someone else’s trash can.
I was truly wise to opt for the smaller-size garbage can, I can see that now.
Only in Portland… ” I once observed a neighbor tanning a deer hide in a boiling vat of her own urine right across the alley”.
Also, I’ve observed that Washignton County uses opossums to patch pot holes on rural roads.
Pardon me???
Is that like using incarcerated humans to patch potholes, or are the opossums the patching material? It would seem to be difficult to get the opossums to use the tiny shovels, so I’m guessing the latter.
If they’re pre-flattened, they’re easy to move by their tails.
When I lived on twelve acres in the country, we would take animal remains and parts, e.g. from butchering rabbits or from turkey carcasses after Thanksgiving, and leave them in the farther, uninhabited portion of the land. Next day there would be no sign of them nor of the happy coyotes.
I was doing something similar here and figured I was feeding the local raccoons, possums and foxes. That may have been slightly true, but it was also attracting rats and that’s never a good thing.
Once I threw out something big and a few hours later it sounded like fat men in high heeled boots were marching around on my roof. About twenty turkey vultures had arrived and a bunch of them were waiting on the roof for their turn.
Unpaid labor.
All of this talk of carrion and scavengers leads me to pose a somewhat-related question: Is there any reason why I wouldn’t want to introduce black rat snakes to our downtown neighborhood? I mean, what snake wouldn’t love being turned loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet? Why don’t cities pursue this as a natural solution? Is it because the cost of living in large urban areas is simply too high for the average snake?
I think that the problem is that most people cringe at snakes (spiders, too… which upsets me.) Paul’s aunt Marie was an evangelical christian. Whenever she would see a snake, she would kill it. And then she wondered why she had so many mice in her home….
Yup–if this is indeed doable, it would fall victim to collective popular heebie-jeebies.
I once worked at a plant nursery, and before opening, we arrived to find a skinned partial skinless body outside the gate. We called the police who inspected it briefly. They said that they could tell by the color that it was not human: skinned humans, they said, are pink and this body, what there was of it, was gray. I think one of the guys took it way out back to the tree section and left it. So just hope to only find gray skinned bodies, but really, I hope we don’t find any bodies. We have turkey and black vultures here, so I suppose someone had a feast.
Wait! Why would anyone know OFF THE TOP OF THEIR HEAD what color a skinned human was?
We didn’t even think to ask. We were just so glad that someone in authority said it wasn’t human. Authority being a local cop so maybe we should have asked more questions. He wasn’t a pathologist.
Day-um. We need an edit function.
I do know that vultures don’t eat dead clowns. They taste funny
Stop that right now.
Oh my, this topic does draw a crowd!