I found a dead adult turkey vulture and examined the body and found a broken tarsometatarsus (avulsion fracture of the bone). Is this the reason it died?
Turkey vultures are obviously huge and have to run/jump a little bit to be able to take off. Without being able to take off, did it just starve to death??
(really upset I didn't find it sooner, vultures are my favourite and I wish it could have survived) :(
Was just driving over to Mt P this morning about 9:50 AM, and there had to be 75-100 turkey vultures (I think, not 100% sure, see pics below) swarming around the Mt. P side of the bridge. Any idea what's up? Is this common behavior? It was peak tide with high winds, wonder if they're flushed out of a brooding area due to unusually high waters? It was an eerie thing to see, not used to seeing that number of vultures consolidated in one flock. The outer reaches of the flock extended down towards Patriots Point. Lotta birds!
Couple of screenshots below that don't really do justice to how strange a sight it was. Notice you can see at lot more around the bridge spires. At least one of them was dead on the bridge too, guessing it got clipped by a truck or hit a support cable or something.
https://preview.redd.it/2cdg73nax6y71.png?width=2346&format=png&auto=webp&s=40e85bc66e8f2280731248b45ce2c09ffdd56969
https://preview.redd.it/thpm45nax6y71.png?width=2356&format=png&auto=webp&s=00976740e95816642e510bb75e56367c062704b4
