By Xcaret Nuñez
Ranchers across the Midwest are battling black vultures, a federally protected bird that has a reputation for killing newborn livestock. While the birds play a major ecological role, their expanding population is becoming a big nuisance for producers.
Yancy Paul recalls rushing across his lush-green pasture early last spring, opening gate after gate to get to his newborn calf that was swarmed by flocks of black vultures.
“Before I could get to him, it was probably 40 or 50 of them just plucking at that newborn calf,” Paul said.
The rancher helps his parents, Beth and Jim Little, raise beef cattle and sheep at their 800-acre farm in Lexington, Oklahoma. He said he’d heard about black vultures preying on newborn livestock, but it was a sight he had never seen. Now, he said he’ll never forget it.
“They literally pick holes in them,” Paul said. “I mean they just start with their eyes and in their backside and then just start pecking holes in their guts.”
Paul is among the growing number of farmers and ranchers who say they are losing newborn livestock like calves, lambs and piglets to black vultures. The birds normally migrate from South America through the southeastern U.S., but black vultures have expanded their range northward into Missouri, Indiana and Illinois over the past decade.
“You can't sit and watch (black vultures) 24 hours a day,” said Oklahoma livestock producer Beth Little (pictured right; Little's son, Yancy Paul, is pictured left). “I mean it got so bad I’m thinking about putting cameras up so we could watch the birds. That's almost insanity that we have to worry about that.”
Although there’s not a lot of research on why black vulture populations are expanding north, one theory is that warmer weather is shifting the birds' behavior, said Travis Guerrant, a wildlife biologist and state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service-Wildlife Services for Missouri and Iowa.
“The winters are a lot more mild than they ever had been in the past,” Guerrant said. “When you have a milder winter then you have more food availability. They can then survive throughout the year in some of these areas and persist.”
The sooty-black birds have a five-foot wing span and weigh about five pounds. They’re related to turkey vultures, which have distinct bright-red heads, but black vultures are known to be the bolder bird of the two.
“For the most part, black vultures strongly prefer scavenging,” said Marian Wahl, a doctoral student studying black vulture management at Purdue University. “But when the opportunity arises, and there's a particularly vulnerable animal, they are happy to take advantage of that.”
That’s a big issue for livestock producers.
In Oklahoma alone, ranchers lose around $200,000 worth of livestock each year to black vultures, said Scott Alls, the state director of wildlife services. There’s also the lost time and effort that went into raising the livestock — and the added grief of knowing their animals experienced a gruesome death.
“I was very, very upset,” Paul said. “We take care of these animals like they’re our babies and for a calf to die like that, it’s just horrible.”
Black vultures are tricky to manage
Black vultures aren’t an easy bird to scare away, and because they’re protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, producers can’t legally kill the scavenger bird without federal permission.
“We do offer depredation permits for farmers to take some of these nuisance birds,” said Ken Richkus, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Division Chief of Migratory Bird Management. “But when we do authorize that lethal take, we do need to make sure that it's sustainable. There’s also some accountability associated with it so we live up to our obligations under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.”
Depredation permits issued directly from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cost $100 and must be renewed each year. But sub-permits issued under the Black Vulture Livestock Protection program are free and allow producers to kill up to five black vultures per year.
Missouri, Oklahoma and Illinois are among the states that adopted the USFWS program when it launched in 2021. Since then, the Missouri state legislature has invested in developing a partnership between agriculture and wildlife state agencies to get the word out about black vulture management.
Click here to see more...