“These things go after an animal in groups. Black vultures, on the other hand, can be aggressive and will kill living animals, such as lambs and calves on farms, and groundhogs and other wild animals. Turkey vultures are mild-mannered and timid, the expert explained, and tend to scavenge on dead animals and roadkill.
What sets the two species apart most is their behavior, Gehrt said. Not the sameīlack vultures are not the same as a turkey vulture, sometimes called a turkey buzzard, Gehrt said.īlack vultures are slightly smaller than turkey vultures and have a black head, whereas the more common turkey vulture has a reddish head, he said. Judging by the number of calls he’s received from producers in the past three years, Ohio State University Extension wildlife specialist Stan Gehrt agrees that vulture numbers are increasing in Ohio.Ĭompared with West Virginia, where there’s a sizable established colony of black vultures that cause “pretty dramatic” damage, Ohio is still relatively unscathed, according to Gehrt.īut those West Virginia birds are moving northward, he said, giving Ohio livestock producers a whole new predator to deal with. “You hate to see them taking a baby calf and killing it when there’s plenty of dead deer laying around they could be going after.” Gaining ground “It’s disheartening, and another obstacle in the production cycle,” said Kilbarger, who manages a herd of about 100 commercial brood cows near Bremen, Ohio.
“Hard cotton-pickin’ things to kill, too.” “They’re just damn vicious, mean, ugly birds,” he says of the black vultures that have made their presence known in the county. He’d already seen what the vultures intended: to peck the eyes out of the calf, to disorient it, then go to work at killing it. But when those birds got too close, got too comfortable with tiring that cow and trying to cut her calf away from her protection, he swooped in to protect the herd. He sat a ways back on his ATV, just watching. SALEM, Ohio - Fairfield County cattleman Dick Kilbarger saw it with his own eyes: Eight or 10 black vultures spread in a semi-circle across his pasture, backing a cow and her newborn calf into a corner.
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