[ExI] vultures sneeze

[William Flynn Wallace]

Get 'The Secret Life of Garden Birds' and you will be totally amazed,
especially at the social systems of crows and ravens.  Not to be sneezed at.

bill w

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:20 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Well, I’ll be damn.  No, the subject line isn’t the name of the new hip
> hop group.  I have been watching birds and wildlife for half a century and
> today I saw something completely new and unexpected: vultures sneeze.
>
>
>
> I have heard that chirping in birds might have some other purpose besides
> intra-species communication; clearing of the airways analogous to mammal’s
> sneezing.  But that wouldn’t apply to non-chirpers such as carnivorous
> birds in general.
>
>
>
> Vultures are difficult to observe beasts; they don’t like people much.  A
> vulture had a snake in my neighbor’s backyard this morning.  As he was
> devouring his snake he did something that looks exactly like a mammalian
> sneeze: with the side-to-side head shaking immediately after the discharge,
> a little like what dogs, cats and humans sometimes do.
>
>
>
> I went for my video camera and made a bunch of video, but none of it is
> particularly YouTube-able.  That sneeze would have been, but he didn’t
> repeat the behavior.
>
>
>
> Conclusion: at least one example of a species of carnivorous bird sneezes.
>
>
>
> spike
>
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