Atticus was found in a field in Ballard in Monroe County, WV, with a broken wing that had healed wrong, locking his elbow and denying him flight. He had been on the ground for a while, scavenging food from the nearby roadway when he was rescued at the beginning of October 2020. He was just a few months old. There is no way to fix the wing without losing it completely.
Turkey vultures are extremely intelligent and gentle birds and, unlike black vultures, they very rarely kill their food. They are scavengers, usually finding their food source in freshly killed bodies of local wildlife. They are cooperative in their flock, using their highly developed sense of smell and excellent vision to locate food. Turkey vultures are careful to hide their nesting sites away from human activity, laying 1 to 3 eggs in a rock crevice, old hollow log, ledges, thickets, old abandoned heron or hawk nests, or abandoned buildings. Nesting sites can be used for over a decade. Turkey vultures use thermal updrafts to soar high in the sky, teetering on the winds with their distinctive dihedral wingset. Despite their 5.5 foot wingspan, these birds are lightly built and weigh just over 4 pounds. They look black from a distance but they are actually more of a dark brown bird, with almost white colored wing feathers when viewed from underneath on a soar. It is not unusual to see turkey vultures in the early morning catching the sun by stretching their wings out with their backs to the sun, warming their feathers up for the day’s soaring. Atticus can live to be 20–24 years old.
