Cattle faces a growing threat from a protected vulture spreading north amid climate change

Above, a pair of birds circle in the distance. Bryant, who hopes they are not black vultures, is relieved to see that they are just turkey vultures — red-headed and not aggressive.

“Honestly, the black vulture is one of the ugliest things I have ever seen,” he said. “It’s easy to hate them.”

Black vultures, scavengers that sometimes attack and kill sick or newborn animals, were not a problem here. But now Bryant sees birds more frequently after birth. He hasn’t lost a calf in several years, but they’ve killed his animals before. So now he is taking action to stop them.

In some of his fields, he has set up a scarecrow of sorts—a dead black vulture—intended to frighten the birds. It’s a requirement of obtaining a depredation permit through the Kentucky Farm Bureau, which allows him to shoot just a few birds a year. He said the dead bird keeps the live birds away for about a week, but they eventually come back.

It’s a problem that may get worse for ranchers as the bird’s range expands northward, partly due to climate change. Lobbyists are pushing for legislation to allow landowners to kill more of these protected but not endangered birds. But experts say more research is needed to understand how the birds affect livestock and how their removal could affect ecosystems.

Warmer winters and changing habitats expand the birds’ range

Black vultures used to live mainly in the southeastern United States and south in Latin and South America, but over the past century they began to expand rapidly northward and also westward into the desert Southwest, said Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration.

Warmer winters on average, fueled by climate change, are making it easier for birds to survive in places that used to be too cold for them. What’s more, the human footprint on suburbs and rural areas is enriching their environment: development means cars, and cars mean roadkill. Ranchers can also offer a buffet of weak animals to eagles learning the seasonal calving schedule.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from a lot of different studies on birds, it’s that they’re very good at utilizing food resources and remembering where those things are,” Farnsworth said.

Although black vultures are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, they are not a truly migratory species, he said. Instead, they reproduce, and some disperse to new areas and settle there.

How did farmers deal with it?

After losing a calf to a black vulture a decade ago, Tom Carr, who ranches near Pomeroy, Ohio, tried to postpone the fall calving season until later in the year in hopes the eagles would be gone by then. But that didn’t help, he said, as the birds stay all year round.

Until the newborn calves are a few days old, “we try to keep them close to the pens,” says Joanie Grimes, owner of a 350-calf farm in Hillsboro, Ohio. She said they have been dealing with the birds for 15 years, but moving them away from remote fields has helped improve things.

Annette Eriksen has observed black vultures for several years on her property, Twin Maples Farm in Milton, West Virginia, but has yet to lose any of her animals. When they expect calves and lambs to appear, they move the cattle into the barn, and also use dogs – Great Pyrenees – trained to patrol the fields and barnyards looking for birds of prey that might harm the animals.

The scale of their work makes it easy to account for each animal, but “any loss would be severely detrimental to our small business,” she wrote in an email.

Local ranchers’ associations and state farm bureaus often work together to help producers obtain depredation permits, which allow them to shoot a few birds each year, as long as they track them on paper.

“The difficulty with this is if the birds show up, by the time you can get your permit and get all the care you need, the damage is done,” said Brian Shooter, executive vice president of the Indiana Cattlemen’s Association. Farmers said calves can be worth hundreds of dollars or upwards of $1,000 or $2,000, depending on the breed.

A new bill would allow farmers to shoot protected birds with fewer leaves

In March, congressional lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow farmers to trap or kill any black vulture “in order to prevent death, injury, or destruction of livestock.” Many farmers and others in the livestock industry have supported the move, and the National Cattlemen’s Association in July commended the House Natural Resources Committee for pushing the bill.

Farnsworth, of the Cornell lab, said it’s not necessarily a good idea to make it easier to kill black vultures, which he said play a “critically important role” in cleaning up “dead stuff.”

Simply killing birds may make room for more predators or nuisance predators, Farnsworth said. He said that although black vultures can leave behind blood damage, current research does not show that they are responsible for a significant percentage of livestock deaths.

But many farmers don’t want to do anything.

“They eat them alive,” Carr said. “It’s absolutely disgusting.”