My folks relocated a few weeks before I entered high school. The house we moved into was an inglorious shade of brown mustard that Mom described as pumpkin-colored. She tolerated it until the day when Dad – with farm-bred slyness – called it “cat-manure yellow”. After that she’d settle for nothing but gleaming white, so we slapped on two coats of paint.
Real estate professionals might have picked a euphemism instead – maybe Colonial Ochre. I suspect they had influence where I live now. For instance, my suburb is sometimes thick with turkey hawks – or that’s the name people use. My online search for “turkey hawk” turned up nothing per se. These are turkey vultures, a.k.a. turkey buzzards. And they look like buzzards. Yet that name might imply that dead things stink up the place and attract winged garbage disposals. A hawk, though – that’s a magnificent bird of prey.
I don’t challenge the local names anymore. A long-time Georgian once told me that a certain species was poison oak, because her daddy had called it that. I later realized that’s a regional usage. Standard references show poison ivy leaves as tear-drop-shaped or jagged (botanists would call them entire or serrate), and poison oak leaves with smooth rounded edges (i.e., undulate or crenate). But the old-timers around here call the heart-shaped leaves poison ivy, and the jagged mitten-shaped leaves poison oak. I came across a local patch of true poison oak once; I didn’t ask what they’d call it.
But back to turkey hawks. They’re amazing in their own way. For one thing, even for vultures they have an incredible sense of smell. And they wait two or three days to eat a carcass, but no more. That softens its hide but limits our risk of contagion. Some reports say they also eat grapes and pumpkins – make that grapes and Colonial Ochre fruiting structures. It’s disconcerting to discuss fresh produce and rotting meat in the same sentence – though histories of jerky do it – however there’s evidence that turkey hawks wait until after all the sell-by dates.
Either way, their diet leaves a long list of pathogens around the beaks of turkey hawks and their best friends, black vultures. So, why don’t the birds get sick? Because germs can’t survive a stomach pH of zero. That’s more than 10X the acid concentration that humans have; as corrosive as battery acid. What *does* kill buzzards is liver poisoning from eating carcasses that have drugs (diclofenac) or bullets (they dissolve in acid), and the problem is global.
Another curiosity is that two types of anaerobic bacteria dominate buzzard intestines: Clostridia (as in botulism) and Fusobacteria (as in flesh-eating bacteria), which are also dominant in alligator intestines and, curiously, also in the gastrointestinal tracts of cancer patients. That pairing suggests that the microbes occupy complementary metabolic niches.
One author compared the gut bacteria of vultures to probiotics. That raises a hope that the microbial mutualism there might offer insights for pairing milder organisms in human probiotics. We need a better name for this phenomenon. “Turkey soup”, anyone?
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Food for Thought
Primary article: M. Roggenbuck et al., “The microbiome of New World vultures,” Nature Communications, 5, Art. No. 5498 (November 25, 2014).
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6498
Commentary on Vulture Digestion: Ewen Callaway, “Microbes help vultures eat rotting meat,” Nature (November 26, 2014).
https://www.nature.com/news/microbes-help-vultures-eat-rotting-meat-1.16345
Clostridia: F. Scaldaferri, V. Petito, and A. Gasbarrini, “Commensal Clostridia: leading players in the maintenance of gut homeostasis,” Gut Pathogens, 5(23):1-8 (2013).
https://gutpathogens.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1757-4749-5-23
Fusobacteria: A.D. Kostic et al., “Fusobacterium nucleatum potentiates intestinal tumorigenesis and modulates the tumor immune microenvironment,” Cell Host Microbe, 14(2):207-215 (2013).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3772512/
The Combination in Cancer: Y.-Y. Hsieh, “Increased abundance of Clostridium and Fusobacterium in gastric microbiota of patients with gastric cancer in Taiwan,” Scientific Reports, 8, Article No. 158, p. 1-11 (2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18596-0
For context on behavior in the gut biome: Hannah M. Wexler, “Bacteroides: the good, the bad, and the nitty-gritty,” Clinical Microbiology Reviews 20(4):593-621 (2007). https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/593.full.pdf
Circling-V ™ 