When it is hot, we change the animals' water a couple of times a day to give them a way to cool down. Hannah opened the door to tend to our animals and saw this black vulture sitting on our peafowl pen. It would not fly away, and Hannah didn't want to go any closer to it. "I don't like the way it's looking at me." The baby girl needed "back up." So, she called for mama.
I knew the black vultures are known to be more aggressive than the turkey vulture, but I was still surprised by how it just sat there without a care of my close proximity. It was looking at me as much as I was looking at it.
When we were helping Brandon with his roof, we had a 21 cubic foot upright freezer fail. A power outage caused ice to melt and block the inlet for cold air, so we lost everything in the freezer. It stunk, literally and figuratively, but stuff happens. We're OK and won't even feel the loss. I have been consistently adding to our food storage for many years due to our family size. God will provide what we need. I had been praying God would make time for me to clean out and reorganize our freezers, so that, at least, was accomplished!
Since we had so much going on, I instructed Bethany and her younger sisters to take it all out in wagon loads and dump it in a remote area on our farm. That's what brought us about a dozen vultures for a couple of days. They very quickly cleaned up the mess for us. That gave us an opportunity to see one of these interesting creatures up close. We also got to see their interesting behaviors in our trees and watched one "dive bomb" something in the woods. The experience was better than an IMAX film!
Dear Reader, I am thankful God put carrion feeders on the earth to clean things up, aren't you? Life would be much less pleasant without their help. I appreciate knowing that what we can't use is able to be used by another creature. God is the ultimate recycler. All of His ways are good!
And these are they which you shall hold in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the vulture, and the osprey,
Leviticus 11:13
