I once had the privilege of attending a bird display at Colchester Zoo. As it was a bit cold and windy, some of the usual birds were kept in their cages. The zoo keepers decided to bring out the vultures for us to look at instead. I was disappointed not to see the usual birds of prey and thought I was in for a boring time. That was until the zoo keeper started describing the vulture's 'design' features, as he termed them. I had not really thought before of how well suited vultures are for their environment. Did you know the following?

• Vultures can smell dead meat from over a mile away and it only has to be 12 to 24 hours old before it gets noticed. Not many other birds have this ability.


• As well as good smell, they also have excellent eyesight and can spot dying or recently dead animals from quite high up in the air.


• The vulture wingspan is large. We are talking up to 6ft wide (the height of some men). They can glide for hours at a time by taking advantage of thermal updrafts (warm rising pockets of air) and grabbing free lifts.


• You may wonder why some vultures have bald heads. This is a cleanliness feature. The head of a vulture can get into all sorts of undesirable places. The lack of feathers mean that any harmful bacteria will eventually die out in the sun and not hang around festering in feathers.


• Vultures have special hooked beaks for digging and ripping out flesh from dead animals or fruit.


• The long neck is useful for getting to those hard-to-reach bits of flesh. They feed by thrusting their heads into body cavities.


• Vultures can digest meat in any stage of decay, and withstand diseases that would kill any other creature (i.e. They are super-tough birds). Turkey vultures have been known to live up to 24 years. The average age is guessed to be around 20 years.


• One gross fact is that vultures urinate on themselves to cool off, as they lack sweat glands. This also disinfects their legs by killing any germs picked up from walking through a carcass.


• The vulture has few predators. His most common defensive tactic is to vomit at his adversary and fly away. Now there is something to try if you ever get attacked!


• Unlike most birds, vultures do not build nests.


• One species of vulture is very different. Known as the 'palm nut vulture', it feeds almost exclusively on the fleshy outer portions of the oil palm fruit. A vegetarian vulture!

Though the vulture may be considered ugly and undesirable, it has a place in the animal kingdom. Without it, how else would we describe a person as being a 'vulture'?
Can evolution explain how a bird is equipped with such essential features for surviving in very dry and food barren places? It has bodily disease defenses that few other birds can match. Was this immune system developed over time, or is it more likely that it was given the capacity in the first place? What would a vulture evolve from anyway? Was it a lizard before? Why would lizards need to fly to eat fruit or dead things? Was it an eagle before? If so why did it decide to live in an harsh environment and not fly somewhere else? Flying away would be a lot easier than waiting millions of years to evolve into something that could survive.
If natural selection produced the vulture, then what was it before? Where did that creature come from? What about the creature before? Was it a fish at some point? Is there a fossil record to show fish-to-vulture evolution? (I have not seen it yet!). Why would a fish want to evolve into a vulture anyway? I am sure many fish are happy enough swimming about eating plankton. Why trade that in for a desert-life, having to survive on dead rotting meat? Evolution raises many questions. Is it not easier to agree with the zoo keeper and say that the vulture was designed?
So we see that even the vulture is a testimony to the wise and creative power of God who has fixed abundant life all over the earth, even in the harshest of conditions.

-LS