Patty Loew:
This week we're also talking turkey but not the traditional kind you think of around Thanksgiving. "In Wisconsin" reporter Jo Garrett shows you where to find the largest gatherings of turkey vultures in the Midwest at Devil's Lake state park.

Jo Garrett:
Devil's Lake state park is always a stunning place. And on an 80 degree day in October, it's bustling with visitors. It's a bit of a climb up past those boulder fields to the top of of the ridge. But the view is worth the walk. But look again. There's something more, many more.

Child:
Look at all of them.

Man:
This morning we saw 250 at once.

Man:
Wow!

Jo Garrett:
You're watching an annual October event, turkey vultures amassing in Devil's Lake state park before their fall migration.

Woman:
300 or 400 birds congregate there.

Jo Garrett:
Mike Mossman organized this field trip along with his wife, Lisa Hartman. Mossman works as a wildlife researcher for Wisconsin's department of natural resources. Yet it's on their own time that this couple has spent decades researching this bird.

Lisa Hartman:
I met mike in 1981 and I guess in 1983 is when I started going out to do turkey vulture work with him. So I've been doing it for 25 years. I just love watching them fly in.

Mike Mossman:
It was just absolutely magical and still like that for me. it doesn't change at all. They're just so beautiful to watch in the air. They seem to be so adept and they can fly literally for hours and hours and hours without flapping their wings. They're very adept at just soaring. I'm sure when they're soaring, they're as relaxed they would be as if standing except they would have to pay attention and follow where the currents are and their wings are held, instead of a V above the body, that's a characteristic of the bird in flight.

Jo Garrett:
Flight is one thing. Do they still compel close up? For this couple, they do.

Lisa Hartman:
I can't stop looking at them. I just am so taken with them. I could spend all my days just staring at that bird. Watching them coming into roost, watching them flying, watching them socialize with one another in the trees in the morning. There's nothing that I don't -- I'm not interested in knowing about them or watching them.

Jo Garrett:
It's this passion that has fueled their decades of research. We prevailed upon their years of knowledge when we asked the two turkey vulture experts to look close, analyze some roosting and flying footing we had shot. For example, we knew that the turkey vultures are stars at soaring. They can float for hours. But how do they change directions if they don't flap their wings?

Lisa Hartman:
Their wing tips, they had emarginated primaries so the finger-like space between the tips of the primaries so they maneuver those. Each feather is the shape of a wing in itself. And so they use just the wing tips to maneuver around the current.

Jo Garrett:
They talked about feathers. And behaviors. The preening of feathers.

Mike Mossman:
The same things he's doing now.

Jo Garrett:
That he, with his head buried in his feathers, sitting on a perch overlooking their kitchen table is their turkey vulture.

Lisa Hartman:
Ok. So this is our captive turkey vulture, Uncle Butsie. I named him Uncle Butsie after a favorite uncle of mine who loved birds and who encouraged my interest. His left wing is broken, we took him on as an education bird.

Jo Garrett:
Uncle Butsie provides the up close portion of their education program.

Lisa Hartman:
We have learned that our birds go down to South and Central America for the winter. I would do slide shows, educational slide shows for people and people still say they are ugly and stink. I started taking a live bird with me. It was amazing the difference, to convince people how beautiful they were. Then the bird could do it by itself.

Lisa Hartman:
It's so beautiful, you have to look at them close up. They have this iridescence in their feathers and I think it's so anemically described in the literature and field guides.

Jo Garrett:
Both feel that the turkey vulture doesn't get its due. And it's unduly dissed for chewing on dead things. Consider another bird. An American icon that often shares the same diet but has much better PR.

Mike Mossman:
In the winter I know bald eagles are feeding primarily on dead things the same way that the -- the same fields, same type of carcasses that turkey vultures would be in on in the summer, bald eagles are in the winter.

Jo Garrett:
Death is ever present and vultures play a crucial role, due in part to their biology.

Mike Mossman:
They have a very good sense of smell which is strange for a bird to have.

Jo Garrett:
Maybe it helps to watch them for a while, to gain an appreciation of their place. Jan Oslickson, one of the trip participants.

Jan Oslickson:
Being on a farm and seeing them, you know, and something dies in the field or the woods and you see the turkey vultures cleaning it up, they do a good job. Nature's cleanup tool.

Mike Mossman:
For me they're beautiful because they're part of creation. They have a place in nature. We look up and there's a whole bunch of vultures flying around. We feel like, you know, the world is okay. Everything is working. Everything is beautiful. Nothing could express that more than that bird.

Jo Garrett:
Hartman has been writing a memoir about her time as a turkey vulture researcher. Here is a little bit to leave you with.

Lisa Hartman:
It's just that sort of day where the only thing that makes sense to do is to stand on the highest point possible, to greet migrant vultures coming in from the south. To search and wait like the fairy young maidens in the ancient ballads for their lovers to return over the distant and rolling seas. The only difference is that I know my love, the vultures, will actually return. Whereas for the young maidens in the ballads, this was not always the case.

Jo Garrett:
There is beneath our busy lives an old call, painted stroke after stroke on the sky. It's the call of migration, that ancient coming and going, reminding us of our own rise and fall.

Patty Loew:
Here's an interesting side note. The turkey vulture has the largest breeding range of any bird in North America. It stretches all the way from Central Canada to the tip of South America. For more information on reports, go to our website at wpt.org/inwisconsin. That story was part of our larger series Jo Garrett produced on the Great Wisconsin Nature and Birding Trail. And you can watch the “On the Trail” special and "In Wisconsin" this Sunday at 12:00 right here at Wisconsin Public Television.