A Surprise Visitor

Poor pictures, but the best I could get from through a window and far away.  I was in the house and saw a huge bird swoop into the backyard.  I intially thought it was a turkey due to the large body size. 

I assumed that if I opened the deck door for a clearer shot, it would fly away before I could get the camera to focus on it.  I was right about that.  When it DID finally fly away, the picture I got was so blurred it could have been anything from an elephant far away to a spider on the camera lens

But when it flew away, I could see it was obviously a vulture.   I couldn't imagine why a vulture would fly between and under trees.  There was nothing dead out there; I had been at that spot not long before.

The only thing I can think of is that the spot it landed was where a tree stump had been ground in January.  I had an old bag on corn gluten meal that had gotten damp and packed hard as dry brown sugar and I couldn't break it up well enough to use it in my lawn spreader.

So, thinking of what I could usefully do with it, I remembered that wood chips take a LOT of nitrogen from the soil.  Therefore, the fastest way to break down wood chips would be to put a LOT of nitrogen on them.  Corn gluten is very high in nitrogen...  So I had dumped the bag on the pile of wood chips and pounded it down into smaller clumps.  The rains have been dissolving it into the wood chips.

I know that vultures are said to hunt by sight, not smell, but there is a full leaf canopy overhead, and the vulture came in under the trees from downwind.  I think that it was attracted by some smell from a lot of nitrogen in one spot beginning to react with the older wood chips.

But it sure was strange...