This nice leucistic turkey vulture lady is doing some arts and crafts! Her name is Ms. Grain-Entrapment Irony, according to traditional vulture naming conventions.
She’s my half of an art trade with @theveryworstthing! Her vultures (and other Rabbits of Downtrodden drawings) were my very first introduction to her art, and it was love at first sight. Please follow her for some peerless creature/character design, if you aren’t already!
excellent vulture 10/10!!!! vultures and rabbits alike love good beadwork, so she’s probably very popular. i love her dappled pattern and her cute little craft box that is perfectly color coordinated with her outfit.
Got an account on conceptart.org to try and get my portfolio reviewed, found out about their “Character of the Week” contest, and was really interested in the current prompt (Horsemen of the Apocalypse as non-standard centaurs).
Here’s the initial exploratory sketches. I really hope bird-taurs are allowed, because I quite like vulture!Death. But I guess if not, jaguar!War (JagWar? LOL) might be who I go with.
I’ve restocked my Etsy shop with a new and improved version of this patch design. This time it’s woven (not embroidered), so the detail is as crisp as the air in the north of England right now.
Happy International Vulture Awareness Day! Bald is beautiful!. Why are they bald? These birds help clean up our environment and keep diseases at bay by eating carcasses. The bald head helps reduce the places bacteria can hide (such as in feathers) while they are digging in for dinner. Their adaptations to deal with carrion don’t stop there though. These birds can literally eat diseases in flesh, and destory them in their guts, that would otherwise contaminate the environment. That’s right, vultures keep humans and other animals healthy!!
However, most of them are suffering and dying out at human hands, and the world will be much worse off without these incredible birds. Vultures all over the world are shot and exposed to intentional, and unintentional, lead and chemical contamination of carcasses. Right now many old world vultures are having their populations devastated by the use of Diclofenac in livestock, which kills vultures soon after they eat from the carcass. Even if you don’t like vultures, this is a problem directly applicable to humans, with the backlash already wreaking havoc in India.
This post contains photos of vultures I’ve been fortunate to meet over the years. My favorite vulture is, of course, the bearded vulture (aka lammergeier), but I don’t have a photo of a live one, only dead ones (study skins at museums). I can’t wait until the day I can meet and interact with a live bearded vulture, but that may only happen in captivity if we don’t tackle the dangers of diclofenac, lead, and persecution, and do so quickly. We are talking vulture species extinctions within the next few years.
FromNew York Times bestselling author of the “twisty-mystery” (Vulture) novel In a Dark, Dark Wood, comes The Woman in Cabin 10, an equally suspenseful and haunting novel from Ruth Ware—this time, set at sea.
Meet the Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus)! This bird has a wide range which spans parts of Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, and northern Africa. It flies high in the skies, searching for the carcasses of medium- to large-sized animals to devour.
To distinguish this vulture from others, look at its silhouette while it’s in flight. From below, it’ll appear to have a little or no tail—some even say it looks like a “huge flying mustache.”
