Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 28, 1995 TAG: 9501300017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Black vultures that roost by the hundreds at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant are killing calves, cattle and sheep in the New River Valley, and farmers are fed up with it.
It sounds like a page from a nightmarish Alfred Hitchcock script.
The vultures, flying in flocks of 50 to 200, leave the safety of the arsenal at dawn and range as far as 30 miles looking for a meal. When their taste turns from road kill to live animals, the victims most often have been newborn calves, said Montgomery County farmer Charles Shorter.
The birds, which are federally protected migratory fowl under an international treaty, attack the calves and peck them to death. If a farmer doesn't see an attack, he may think a calf died during birth and was eaten by scavengers later.
Occasionally, Shorter said, vultures will kill young heifers that become temporarily paralyzed during their first pregnancies. If the cows go down and vultures are around, he said, sometimes they don't get up.
Black vultures - not to be confused with larger, red-headed turkey vultures - are a major problem not just in the New River Valley but also all across Virginia and in the Eastern United States, said Martin Lowney, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's animal-damage control officer in Virginia.
``The number of vultures is increasing and the number of complaints is skyrocketing,'' he said.
Besides killing cattle across Virginia, the birds have slaughtered pets and attacked young horses. At Smith Mountain Lake, they've torn roofing shingles off homes and pecked holes in boat and car seats. In Northern Virginia, they've torn vinyl caulking from the windows of high-rise office buildings.
Wednesday night, Lowney talked about the vulture problem with 24 New River Valley farmers and Joe Hunnings, Montgomery County's extension agent. Sixteen of the farmers said they had lost livestock to vultures, Hunnings said.
Thursday morning, Hunnings drafted a letter to Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, to see if federal law could be changed to make it easier to deal with the vultures.
The farmers want Congress to allow them to trap and kill large numbers of the vultures on arsenal property, Lowney said.
The vulture attacks are not a new problem. Shorter, who manages a farm for Virginia Tech and operates his own farm at Longshop near the New River, said he has lost about 20 animals to vultures over the past 30 years. He didn't lose any calves this fall but frightened vultures away from calves on two occasions.
The vultures venture farther from the arsenal these days and have killed livestock on farms as far away as Blacksburg. Neither insurance nor government programs provide compensation for livestock lost to vultures, Shorter said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is charged with protecting the vultures, which along with most other migratory birds are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1936. The maximum penalty for killing one of the birds is a $5,000 fine and six months in prison.
The Fish and Wildlife Service occasionally will issue permits at the request of the Agriculture Department that allow farmers and others to kill the birds when they pose a nuisance. But securing a permit from the service's regional office in Massachusetts is a lengthy process.
Don Patterson, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's chief law-enforcement officer for Virginia and West Virginia, said complaints about black vultures killing calves and goats in various parts of his territory have increased steadily over the past five years.
Vultures are a big problem around the New River Valley because their roost at the arsenal is one of the largest east of the Mississippi River, Hunnings said. If estimates that 1,000 vultures roost at the arsenal are correct, Lowney said, that would make the roost the largest in Virginia. He has found flocks of around 500 on residential property near urban areas.
Hunnings said he has taken canoe trips down the New River and seen the trees black with roosting vultures.
One possible solution - using fireworks or some other method to scare the birds away - would just make them a problem for someone else, Hunnings said. Lowney said the birds might be getting used to loud noises and wouldn't be scared anyway.
The vultures have no natural predators to keep them in check, Lowney said. ``They're at the top of the food chain.''
Black vultures primarily are scavengers, but they're more aggressive than the brown-feathered, red-headed turkey vultures that also roost on the arsenal property and elsewhere in Southwest Virginia.
With a wingspan of less than 5 feet and a short tail, black vultures are noticeably smaller than turkey vultures but just as ugly, according to Hunnings. An adult bird weighs about 4 pounds and has a dark gray to blackish head and large white blotches near the tips of its wings.
The vultures migrate south during cold weather and usually return toward the end of the calving season in the spring. But because of the mild weather this winter, the birds have stayed and will be more of a problem for farmers this year, Patterson said.
Vultures rank with deer and nonmigrating Canada geese as a major source of animal-caused property damage in Virginia, Lowney said.
The deer eat farmers' crops, and the geese have taken over city parks and golf courses in Northern Virginia and the Richmond area, chewing up and defecating on putting greens and causing other sorts of damage.
by CNB