Posted on 12/30/2012 5:11:48 AM PST by JoeProBono
EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla., - Park rangers in the Florida Everglades are offering visitors loaner bungee cords and tarps to protect their cars from marauding vultures.
The big black birds apparently have a taste for automotive rubber, including window seals and wiper blades, and have been known to strip a parked car clean in a matter of hours.
"Exactly why they do it or when they do it or why they choose one vehicle over another, any reasons for that are pretty much unknown," Skip Snow, a park biologist, told The Miami Herald.
Black vultures fly into the Everglades every winter, but their penchant for parked cars makes they atypical snow birds. Park officials have tried to shoo them away from parking lots with loud noises and water hoses.
the Liberals of the animal world. And if they can’t steal it they’ll crap on it.
“They prefer the Fords,” Manduley explained. “They don’t like the Chevys, except the GMC trucks.”
We rented a houseboat on a lake in VA a few years ago. One evening we moored in a secluded cove. There were about a dozen vultures in the trees on the shore that just looked at us. Made us wonder what they knew that we didn’t.
BWAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
My guess is that some of the rubber now exudes some kind of organic by-products (probably amines) that mimic decomposing proteins. Except I wonder why it is only happening in Florida? Maybe one buzzard ate a piece on the side of the road, and told his buddies. :)
On the South Island of New Zealand they have some dark grey parrots that have a liking for auto rubber (wiper blades, window linings etc.).
Vultures have caused extensive damage to cars (employees) at Bull Shoals Dam in NW Arkansas. Est. of 1500 birds. Their droppings rust metal. They are pulling the rubber expansion joints from between concrete slabs/joints. Windshield wipers. Corps of Engineers using “canon fire” to scare them away...
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