A scavenging bird that spends most of its time in warmer climates was rescued in Bar Harbor on Thursday and will likely spend the next few months recovering before getting released back into the wild.
The black vulture was taken to Acadia Wildlife Center, a local rescue organization, where it’s being nursed back to health, said Executive Director Ann Rivers.
While it’s common to see turkey vultures in Maine, black vultures are much more rare. They’re most concentrated in the southeastern U.S., with a range that typically stretches to the southernmost part of New England, according to Audubon.
“For me, it’s a brand new species that I have never had in my hands before in my clinic,” Rivers said.
The black vulture appears to be a juvenile male that was starving, dehydrated and had a hard time flying, according to Rivers. She said that it doesn’t have enough feathers on its legs and face to survive Maine’s cold wintry weather, and its diet of mostly roadkill is hard to find when snow can quickly cover what food would appear.
Usually, juvenile vultures stay with their parents for a few months to learn how to find food, Rivers said. But without its parents and being in a climate that it’s not built for, she finds it incredible that it’s made it this far in the northern winter.
“This guy doesn’t have any of that backup. So he’s obviously been having trouble eating,” Rivers said. “But on the other hand, it’s made it until January, so I don’t know, it’s amazing.”
Rivers said though Maine typically only has turkey vultures, seeing animals outside their normal range isn’t uncommon. Sometimes animals will push the limits of what their bodies can withstand while looking for food, so finding a black vulture in Maine isn’t unheard of.
Doug Hitchcox, staff naturalist for Maine Audubon, said Maine is seeing more and more black vultures as the climate warms. Turkey vultures, which are now common in Maine, were once rare like the black vultures back in the 1970s.
“It’s fun to talk to older birders, especially, who remember the time when even turkey vultures were rare,” Hitchcox said. “And so we’re totally expecting them to become more and more common, and this is the pattern we’re seeing with climate change, is these birds expanding their range northward.”
There are other bird species that are moving northward into Maine, including hepatic tanagers, which are native to the southwestern U.S. and South America.
And, there was the case of the Great Black Hawk, which normally lives in Central and South America, but found a devoted following in 2018 after temporarily taking residence in Portland’s Deering Oaks Park. It eventually had to be euthanized because of complications from frostbite.
Because it’s too cold for the black vulture to survive in the winter, Rivers will wait until spring to release it, but she doesn’t yet know whether she’ll release it in Maine — outside its native habitat — or send it down south.
Hitchcox said that’s a tough decision, because while we want birds to survive, humans can’t know where the bird wants to be more than the bird itself, even if it’s pushing its traditional limits.
“This black vulture, under its own volition, came and is attempting to survive,” Hitchcox said. “We don’t know where it would want to be.”
Rivers emphasized that the black vulture is not a rare bird. They’re very common in their native habitat, which ranges from the southern United States to South America.
To help researchers better understand the habitats of birds, Hitchcox encouraged birders to report sightings on an app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology called eBird.
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