Look up on any hot afternoon and the sky is full of them, black crosses circling on the thermals. Look down at the fish market and they are on the wall in a row, waiting, like a committee.
Where you’ll see it
Everywhere. Roofs, roads, beaches, boats, dumps and thermals over the hills. Black vultures are among the most numerous large birds on this coast.
What to know
A scavenger with a bare grey head, short tail and pale patches at the wingtips visible in flight. They find food by sight, often by watching turkey vultures, which find it by smell, and then arrive in numbers. They are social, intelligent and entirely harmless to anything alive. The service they perform is enormous. Without them, a tropical coast would smell very different.
