Seeing a vulture
A turkey vulture above the road can feel ominous, yet watch how it moves: wings held in a shallow V, rocking as if about to tip. Inside that wobble it stays up for hours with barely a flap, steady through small corrections.
What it may mean
A turkey vulture rarely flaps. It holds its long wings in a shallow V and tilts from side to side, a flight that looks clumsy next to an eagle's flat-winged glide. The rocking is the trick. The raised wings let the bird right itself after every gust without a single wingbeat, so it can ride rising warm air for hours while its keen nose does the searching. For a vulture, steadiness is not stillness but constant small adjustment. People often judge their own course the other way round: a plan rewritten twice, a habit restarted every Monday, a week of small changes of direction can all feel like failing. They may be exactly what keeps you going. Old beliefs in India and Ireland made the vulture an omen of death; across much of the Americas today it is a common sight on a warm afternoon.
Depending on how you saw it
Vultures spreading their wings at dawn
Vultures often stand on a roof, a tower or a dead tree in the morning with wings spread wide. They are warming up and drying off after a cool night, before the air is warm enough to soar. What do you need to do each morning before you can take off?
A vulture following its nose
Turkey vultures can smell carrion from high in the air, and gas companies once noticed them gathering over pipeline leaks, because the odor added to natural gas is also given off by decay. The birds found leaks that people had overlooked. Which warning have you built into your days on purpose, like the smell added to gas, so that a problem cannot stay hidden?
Black and turkey vultures together
A turkey vulture finds a carcass by scent, and black vultures, which rely more on sight, watch it and crowd in. One senses, the others follow. Whose instincts do you trust enough to follow down to the ground?
Vultures on a highway shoulder
A group on the shoulder of a highway is most often cleaning up an animal hit by a car. They step back reluctantly and return as soon as traffic passes. Which unpleasant job do you keep returning to because someone has to do it?
Why it happens in nature
Turkey vultures locate carrion largely by smell, and they respond to ethyl mercaptan, a compound released by decaying flesh and added to natural gas to make leaks detectable. Black vultures have a weaker sense of smell and often follow turkey vultures to food. Both soar on rising warm air and spread their wings in the morning to warm up.
What folk beliefs say
India
In India, the approach of a vulture was considered a sign of death, and a vulture perching on a Hindu household's roof was an unlucky omen of a death within the year.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 714. View the page
Ireland
An Irish account tells that when McManus sat by his dying brother's bed, a bright-eyed bird of the vulture kind came in at the window and perched on the dying man until he passed, which was taken as a most evil omen.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 180. View the page
To reflect on
Which wobble in your plans this week might be a correction that keeps you going rather than a sign that you are failing?