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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

I'm in South East, USA, vice the Indian subcontinent. Did something happen here within the last year? (Maybe the same thing?) I haven't seen vultures (Turkey vultures) in maybe 3/4 of a year. They are usually ubiquitous and highly visible due to large wingspan, staying airborne for long periods etc, using thermals from roads/concrete etc that make them common in human-populated areas.

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We have a lot of turkey vultures here in California.

A few years ago, we found a few fresh dead (poisoned) rats in our barn.

The turkey vulture population immediately dropped to zero at our house, and the rodent population skyrocketed for the next year.

Please use traps (electrocution or old-fashioned wood and metal spring work best. The electrocution ones are more pet-friendly), and not poison to deal with your vermin.

On a related note, we also have started to get Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles again.

Hopefully those populations will continue to recover too.

Poisoned rodents often wander around confused and screaming before they die, and if they do that in a field, they can take out a bird of prey instead of just the vultures.

Seriously, just use the traps. They are way more humane. Also, you won’t have to fish dead animals out of your vents and walls.

I went birding this morning near Ithaca, NY. Five turkey vultures, a bald eagle, and a kestrel (which caught and ate a mouse while we were watching) were among the species seen (and so many kinds of warblers. Really, why are there so many kinds of warblers?) I often see turkey vultures near our house (once a swooping flock of a dozen of them riding the wind coming up from the lake). Black vultures are starting to appear in this area also, most notably at the Cornell U. compost piles.

RatX, MouseX, and RatRid baits by EcoClear use a combination of gluten and salt to dehydrate the rodent, rather than poisoning it with toxins. Supposedly, they work well against rats and mice while being safe for larger animals, including birds of prey, to consume. People may wish to consider using these baits as well for rodent control.

https://ecoclearproducts.com/

One of my favorite pest-control measures is furry and purrs when I stroke him. Currently we don't have rodents, but he likes to catch insects as well.

Cats generally don’t like hunting rats

Funny, our barn cats growing up loved hunting everything, including rats. Maybe indoor cats might not be so inclined though.

https://crittercontroloftampa.com/blog/do-cats-get-rid-of-ra...

That seems like a biased source given they nake money killing rats.

This link speaks to a different point with regard to effectiveness, not apparent enjoyment. (And to be fair to the barn cats, they did pretty well keeping not only rats and mice down, but also snakes and scorpions)

They don’t hunt rats because the rats are large enough to threaten the cat. They probably would win 95% of those fights cleanly but it’s risky enough to not be worthwhile. Enjoyment is certainly not a differentiating thing.

These are urban rats specifically which are larger and may not apply to country rats

I'll grant some cats don't hunt rats.

In our case it was more suburban rats, sometimes they did get big, yes.

The presence of the cat alone will deter rats from nesting nearby. The cat doesn't have to kill the rat just has to make it uncomfortable enough to leave. I work in fire protection in NYC (in the area referenced by the website and their experiment even) and see it all the time

https://pixeldrain.com/u/hocUQxjk proof :)

They will if you don’t feed them.

Old World Vultures are not closely related to New World Vultures (which are closer to storks). The mechanism which kills vultures in India and Africa does not present the same issue in vultures native to North America.

All my schoolboy taxonomy feels useless now! Crazy that it was convergent evolution.

The bit about being closer to storks seems disputed, and contradicted by more recent DNA evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_vulture

I am in the South East too, but I see lots of vultures, but one weird? thing I noticed in the past 4 years is that I see them a lot more often in suburban areas/on sidewalks eating roadkill than I had seen them in the past (usually seeing them circling freeways or rural areas)

IIRC the issue is that new common drugs for humans contain toxins that are deadly to vultures in high doses. One issue with just creating a vulture sanctuary around towers of silence is that it’s nearly impossible to tell if a person has had any of those drugs and if so how much. Plus in that culture cremation/other forms of disposing of bodies are essentially sacrilege because the idea is that having the body touch the earth, fire, or water would be a bad thing which is why they do sky burials in the first place so it’s not like they can just refuse burials.

Here's a link to the general region you describe ordered by most recent sightings. You can zoom in on your specific location and look deeper or draw a new boundary. Hope this helps!

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=40.7014779017...

Maybe they flew north? I've seen plenty of them in Maryland this spring.

Turkey vultures still going strong in my part of the SE USA.

It's a well established fact that animal populations are cyclictic, booming then starving, then booming again.

Predator finds prey aplenty, and so is fruitful and multiplies. Then prey becomes so numerous, it eats prey until there are few left. Predator then has a population crash, and the prey rebound without predation.

Over and over this happens.

Is that what is happening here? Perhaps, as carrion eaters are susceptible too, when this happens to other populations. After all, during this cycle prey and predator both crash... leaving less carrion. And then of course carrion eaters can overpopulate too..

So I wonder, is this just another clickbait headline?

Nah it’s probably rat poison here

Nice try Mr. Rat Poison Salesman.

> So I wonder, is this just another clickbait headline?

No. As the article makes abundantly clear there’s plenty of carrion, it’s just poisoned. Nothing natural about it.

I see that's not even traditional poison, but instead something meant to help the cattle. Unfortunate.

It’s not meant to help the cattle, it’s meant to preserve profits by treating the cattle for a disease they only have because they’re kept in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.

The loss of the towers of silence is a turducken of human incompetence.

That's interesting, I wonder if this accelerates evolution from environmental pressure massively.

that is probably true in the absence of humans, but modern humans ruin all these cycles when they become part of them, often kill apex predators just because they're bored or their activities inadvertently kill them (poisoning everything in site because you don't like mice/rats)

No it's not a click bait headline. Birds that eat carcasses have been in steep decline in many places because of very specific human generated pollutants in the dead animals (in India's case a pain reliever, in California it was lead, etc).

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