mark jackson. serving time in bulgaria. letting you know about it.
"Not all those who wander are lost." [J.R. Tolkien]

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Tagging Vultures (or not tagging vultures, as the case may be)

For the record, yes I did spend five days trying to capture vultures. And, yes it is true we did not capture any. With that said, here is what went on.

First off, about getting there. I left at 06.00 and arrived at around 21.00. It involved a train, two busses, and paying a guy with a car to drive me the last hour and a half.



So, I am in Madjaravo and hang out with my buddy for a couple days. In a town of 500, you don’t really have many opportunities in the entertainment arena. We pretty much just ate and sat on his balcony. [A related note: I have gotten very good at ‘killing’ hours and even days. Perhaps a new marketable skill?] When I asked what day we could be leaving to do the tagging, my buddy’s reply was ‘Sunday or Monday.’ How are we going to know? ‘We will end up running in to him a some point.’ Ok.

On Monday, we left for the other [perhaps smaller] town. We took a bus to a random town – the one with a gas station. Waited for a guy. Took guys truck another hour. And then ended up at the town. Our ‘capturing’ site was about an hour hike outside of the town.

You may be interested to know what one uses to capture vultures. Funny, the answer to that question was also the answer to my question of ‘what is that smell’ when we got into the guy’s truck. Ladies and Gentlemen, you use cow entrails to lure vultures. Rotting assorted leftovers from meat packing plants. Is that all, you may ask. No. You see, those rotting assorted leftovers are placed inside a dead horse. That’s right, horse. Times are hard at the Bulgarian Society for Birds and dead horses are expensive. So, they came up with the ingenious plan of the ‘refillable’ dead horse. Awasome. The dead horse was placed in a cage - a cage with an open door. Attached to the door was a rope which leads to a tent. In this tent lay a volunteer who started his morning by sneaking into the tent before day break. The volunteer’s field of vision was restricted to…the cage – via a peep whole the size of a sliver dollar. Our job was to watch from a far and warn the man in the tent if any birds arrived. From here, the plan goes from reality to pure theory. In theory, the man will pull the rope, which will close the door, and capture the bird. But, as it turned out, no bird went within 50 yards of the door; so, I can not verify how well that part works.


If you make this your wallpaper and then stare at it for five days, you might get the idea.

Our days were spent sitting about a half kilometer from the cage, looking through telescopes and binoculars. Around day two, I reset my trip objectives from ‘vulturing’ to ‘chilling.’ Five days of chilling. Our lunches were light – usually some tomatoes, peppers, bread and some cheese. Our dinners were down in the little village – usually some tomatoes, peppers, bread, some cheese and a couple patties of ground meat. The veggies were from the local’s gardens and the meat was probably from where we got the entrails. Yum.



We did actually see a lot of vultures – around 40 I would say. And they are amazing animals. Interesting fact: they do circle around before they land to eat.


The two tiny white spots [left] and black spots [right] are birds, I promise.

Hands down, the best part of the trip was going to sleep. We just plopped our sleeping bags in a field somewhere under what were by far the most gorgeous stars I have ever seen. The Milky Way was unreal. We spent most of the time after dusk and before sleep watching satellites and shooting stars. During the night, Orion would rise. I would usually wake up and stay up a bit to look at the stars again. They were fantastic.
On the last day, I woke up at sunrise and hiked down to the village to grab a bus and make my way to Belovo. It was Friday and I had a wedding to get to…

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