Date: June 11, 2026

Time: 3 pm

Place: at a building site in Southern Guelph (Ontario, Canada) off Kortright Rd W. A map and the site are shown below.

Latitude: 43° 31′ 0.522″ N
Longitude: 80° 12′ 57.282″ W

Reference:
[1] ‘Bird Tracks & Sign’, Mark Elbroch and Eleanor Marks, Stackpole Books (1st Ed.), 2001.

Turkey Vulture tracks:

Turkey Vulture tracks are described on page 96 of [1]. These tracks can easily be confused with the tracks of several large bird species, e.g., Sandhill Crane, Great Blue Heron, and Canada Goose. Notice the following distinctive features that allow us to positively identify vulture tracks:

• Outer toes are relatively straight
• Toes 2 and 4 don’t splay as much as in goose tracks
• Webbing between toes 2 and 3, and toes 3 and 4
• Forward pointing toes come sharply to a point
• Toe 3 is much longer than toes 2 and 4
• Toe 3 points approximately in the direction of travel
• Toe 1 (the hallux) often registers

Some notes about the Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):
Cathartes comes from Greek kathartēs, meaning purifier or cleanser, referring to the vulture’s ecological role in cleaning up carrion. The species name aura is less certain. In southern Ontario, Turkey Vultures are large, dark, long-winged scavengers, with a wingspan of about 1.7 to 1.8 m, or roughly 5.5 to 6 ft. They are commonly seen from early spring through fall, especially over fields, roadsides, wetlands, woodlots, and shoreline parks, where they ride warm air currents in loose “kettles” and often roost in trees; Ontario Parks describes them as among the earliest spring migrants, moving between the southern U.S. and Canada in spring and fall and sometimes travelling over 300 km per day. They are easy to recognize by their bare red head, dark body, pale silvery flight feathers below, and teetering, shallow-V glide. Their daily behaviour is built around soaring, scavenging, and waiting for thermals, so they may spend mornings perched, sunning, or on the ground before flight conditions improve. They feed mainly on recently dead animals and rarely kill prey themselves; their unusually good sense of smell helps them locate carrion. For nesting, they do not build a real nest, but lay usually two eggs on a bare protected surface such as a rock crevice, cave, cliff ledge, hollow tree, burrow, dense thicket, or old building; in northern parts of their range the breeding season starts later and can extend into August, with young fledging after roughly nine to ten weeks.