Bird Mystery Solved

My investigator skills may be a little rusty since I hung them up when I retired three plus years ago, but I thought I’d drag them out and see if I could find out more about that mysterious upside down hanging bird Marti and I saw the other day.

It turned out to be a simple explanation, and I even found out who did the hanging!  Maybe my investigator skills aren’t as rusty as I thought…

I went and talked to Ranger Ken, who is the staff biologist here at the COE.  He laughed when I told him what we had seen.  He knew all about it because he was the person that hung the bird up in the first place.  In fact, he told me he had hung several others around the COE property and by the Thurmond Dam, too.

There has been recently a bunch of Turkey Vultures that have be causing some problems around the COE property.

                 

The vultures seem to have acquired a taste for roofing shingles, rubber roof coatings at the dam and automobile weather stripping.  Evidently there is something in the rubber that the vultures love to eat and they have caused quite a bit of damage to those items.  By hanging the imitation vulture upside down, it actually scares the real birds away preventing further damage.  Amazing!

It seems to work very well, so I’m going to see if I can find a Murphy doll, hang it upside down near my RV and scare that annoying Murphy away from causing things to break and malfunction on our Journey.  Brilliant, eh?  :c)

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