Welcome to the Buzzards' Roost

The swallows that swarm to San Juan Capistrano are fabled, and that's not fair. What about another winged wonder of another charming place just about as rich in history and architecture and seasonal blessings. Honor is overdue to the birds that gather at the crossroads here as darkness closes, like sentinels of the night, so comforting to the people in their homes.

Yes, the buzzards of Chestertown. How come nobody celebrates them, I don't know.

These eyecatching birds soar around every part of Maryland's Eastern Shore all year long but congregate by the hundreds in Chestertown in the autumn -- so contented they remain throughout the worst of winters and don't abandon their eye-catching aerie until dense growth of leaves in the spring makes it impossible for them to alight. They're not squeezed into some old belfry made of cheap adobe, like those swallows, either. Our discerning birds swoop down on the center of town, perching in a spooky tangle old-growth trees and vines sprouting from a ravine alongside the intersection of Spring and Rt. 213, where there's a convenient stoplight so passersby can pause and go, What the . . . .?

Is that a gift of nature, or what?

But are townfolk taking advantage of this opportunity? Not to the satisfaction of us buzzard-lovers. There's a newish million-dollar tourist center only a block away from the fantastic flock, with a hundred brochures directing tourists to local entertainments, everything from the game farm where you can shoot four pheasants for $95 to the Mason Family Corn Maze (bring flashlights after dark). And nothing points strangers to what they'd want to inspect, probably, if only they knew it as an official tourist site: The Buzzard Roost of Chestertown.

Anybody will admit, that's got a ring to it. There ought to be a movie and a song. And a festival in winter when the leaves are fallen and the buzzards are settled on the bare laced limbs, their still black figures somber as a synod of bishops. Think of the T-shirts. All it would take to get these projects going is a little community spirit.

The day I headed to Town Hall to check on how they might becoming along with some buzzard endeavors, officials had other things on their minds, at first. Town Manager Bill Ingersoll had let himself be distracted by a proposal to hugely expand the historic district, and he seemed totally unready for a more urgent project.

"The buzzards? They're back?" He added quickly, "They're migratory, you know."

Then he set me straight, "They are not really buzzards. They are turkey vultures. You are not supposed to call them buzzards."

I could have told him not all vultures are journalists, either, but okay. Anyway, Bill, how about considering Chestertown's metaphorical potentials? Who was it buying up the houses here for unbelievable prices? Rich People. And who's managed to get that rich? Old people. And why is it you see the same but fixed-up houses back on the market soon enough? Dead people. Sure, the same thing happened down in St. Michaels and Oxford, where retirees come in and retirees pass on, but we've got the imagery they can't touch. We've got the knock-knock-knock, powerful symbols showing us the way, the makings of an unforgettable civic campaign to let newcomers know they've arrived (and will soon enough depart). We got buzzards, that is, vultures.

Ingersoll's small smile was gone. "I'm not going to have anything at all to say about your metaphors."

Then this public official confessed to something only rumored on the far side of the Chester River in the unincorporated settlement where I live and where, a few times, the vultures have congregated, pecking on our roofs and pooping on our boats, which eats holes in our bimini tops, and tearing apart our boat cushions. On several occasions, Ingersoll admitted, efforts actually have been made in Chestertown to shoo it's indigenous bird out of town, where they rightly belong .

"Then they fly across the river and settle on the houses there, and they eat the little rocks off the roofing material. Need 'em for their craws," he informed, and that little smile was definitely back.

Not, Ingersoll was quick to say, that town officials officially do anything to drive away their buzzards. No, but one time the residents around Eliason Hollow, the gloomy grove where the birds roost, were surveyed to see if they thought the flock unsightly. And 75 percent of the folks didn't mind. It was just a few individuals who got noisemakers and ruffled the stinking feathers.

As Ingersoll explained it, you can get a permit for this after proving the birds a nuisance, and then after firing off noisemakers for a month you're allowed to shoot one; you hang the carcass in a tree and that drives away it's relatives.

People who live closest to Eliason Hollow, however, wouldn't admit doing any such thing. John Parker, who managed a nice B&B on the west side of the woods, did acknowledge banging metal poles together sometimes. "They'd fly away, and they'd fly right back." Parker has counted as many as 150 vultures at a time in those trees, and his observations have led him to an ecological discovery: "They sure [relieve themselves] a lot. They go feed during the day on dead fish along the river and by 3 or 4 o'clock they're back in those trees. That's all they do, they sit up there and [relieve themselves]." He suggested, "You might want to clean this up."

On the grove's north border is the beautiful Queen Anne's-style Hills Inn, which, before Michael and Marta Girone bought and restored it, was locally known as The Addams Family Mansion because of sagging porches, dangling shutters and the one big dead tree filled with buzzards.

"They've gone from the place now, but before we moved in they were all over," Marta says. "When we were working on the tower, putting in a skylight, once I heard a plop sound and looked up. It's the first and last time I hope to see the backside of a vulture. I don't think I should go on about that. I'm sure you wouldn't want me to.

"What my husband would do, every morning, he'd take his coffee outside and throw tennis balls at them. You know, buzzards really don't like to be around people."

No wonder. If Chestertown is going to make best advantage of its association with its feathered friends, there's got to be more charity than comes from thrown balls and banged metal poles, or they might fly off again to my side of the river where we really don't have the same need for them. If Chestertown is going to get serious about the Winter Buzzard Fest, reaping the benefits that would bring, it's got some lessons to learn.

As Wayne Bell, then director of the Center for the Environment and Society at Washington College, pointed out, "Basically, they're carrion eaters. You'd be up to your rear end in carrion if we didn't have vultures and dung beetles to break it down in a hurry. You don't see dead animals along the roadside for very long, if you think about it. Thank vultures for it."

It's not easy for some to love a buzzard, and Bell concedes that. "They have a couple of nasty habits," he observes. "The black vultures defecate down their legs, for one thing.

"It's thought to be for thermal regulation. They don't have leg feathers."

See, a little understanding.

No, vultures aren't the birds you'd want to have eating out of your hand. They are, though, just the birds to partake of that hand when your circumstances are exactly right. They instinctively know what some short-sighted humans in Chestertown don't grasp -- how to get the most of the feast that is there for the sharing, wherever it is that buzzards and people come together -- and how so much, always, depends upon the presentation.