Complex Numbers

Vulture

PROMPT September 14th

Today’s prompt was written by Prosperous Snow celebrating !

It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Describe something that you think is beautiful or attractive that someone else might consider unattractive or ugly.

Your mom.



Okay, but really, yes, beauty is highly subjective, and it's not always about physical appearance.

I'll choose my favorite example: the turkey vulture  .

Those birds are, I think the vast majority of people would agree, amazingly unattractive. Ugly, even. So it's not their appearance that is appealing, or even their feeding habits - the idea of eating carrion is repulsive by any human standards.

That's why they're bald, you know. So they can stick their heads deep into a corpse without fouling head feathers. Well, the mechanics of evolution are more complex than that, but that's the general outcome of natural selection in vultures.

And yet, we humans eat carrion, also. Not, to be sure, rotting corpses; but everything we eat (yes, even if you're vegan) is dead. Fresher than a vulture's meal, perhaps, but still... dead. I mean, it's not like lions or whatever eat prey while it's still alive, but there's a brief window there between "I killed it" and "leave it for the vultures," and that window is longer for us, because we have the technology to make it so.

But that brings us to the true beauty of vultures: they remove from the environment those things that, were they to be left to rot, could easily spread sickness. They're the sanitation engineers of the animal kingdom, thus inspiring the scientific name of the turkey vulture: cathartes aura, "golden purifier." They do the job no one else will - or even can - do, and are reviled for it.

It doesn't stop there, though. Turkey vultures in particular are remarkably efficient birds. They won't even flap their wings if they don't have to, preferring instead to locate convenient updrafts and glide to higher vantage points. Maximum reward for minimum effort: I respect, admire, and emulate that. And it seems they don't fly because they have to, but because they want to. I mean, wouldn't you?

There's a popular misconception that vultures circle around animals who are near death, waiting for that moment when they can get their meal. This is not the case. First of all, no self-respecting vulture is going to start munching on a dead beast while it's still fresh enough for apex predators to get their bites in, not unless they're really hungry. Second, the circling is actually the birds staying in an updraft. Hang glider pilots like to look for vultures so they can tell where the thermals are.

They're not cute. They're not cuddly. They're not threats. They're not pets. But they are, in their own way, beautiful.