BUNN, N.C. — At the height of the invasion, Ally Leggett counted 58 buzzards in her yard, on the roof, along the fence, atop the garage — everywhere.
Every morning, 2-foot black birds would perch on her chimney and peck at the bricks, gradually pulling them down. They scattered droppings like liquid business cards.
“(Last weekend), they were up there swarming,” she said, gesturing to the roof. “It makes my dogs insane.”
For at least a year, buzzards have chosen Bunn as scavenger central, defying the Franklin County town’s persistent and varied tries at chasing them off.
Last Wednesday morning, 28 of them sat on a cellular tower along Main Street, and another 21 perched at Bunn High School across the street — nearly 50 visible from a single spot on Main Street. At the local Food Lion, six of them loomed from a single light pole.
Considering Bunn’s human population hovers around 300, buzzards can make a serious claim for majority status.
“I go by and blow my horn at them,” said Steve Massey, police chief.
The cannon experiment
In December, Bunn announced its high school would fire a propane cannon off the roof at regular intervals around the Christmas holidays, making a noise akin to a shotgun blast. Leggett remembers hearing the shots day and night, even at 2 a.m.
“That worked for a while,” Massey said. “It seems they’re back.”
The high school also hung “effigies” around its rooftop to keep the birds from swooping down to congregate. These fakes can be seen from a distance, but on Wednesday, the buzzards fed there undaunted. Two flapped ominously out of a trash bin in the nearby parking lot.
“If I ever sell my house,” said Leggett, a real estate agent, “I’ll have to disclose. People say, ‘Oh, you’re the one with the buzzards.’ ”
Though commonly called buzzards, Bunn’s nuisance birds are either turkey vultures or black vultures, both of them protected species. Federal and state law outlaws killing, hurting or harassing them, according to the NC Wildlife Resources Commission. Even so much as moving a nest requires a permit.
While typically portrayed in popular culture as harbingers of death, circling hungrily overhead, vultures of either type are mostly harmless.
They are known to pull off shingles, yank out window caulk or vinyl siding, the NC commission reports.
A ‘public-relations problem’
Their image suffers further from their habit of vomiting when afraid, and by the acidic quality of their droppings, which can eat through car paint, naturalist Kathy Schlosser wrote in the News & Record of Greensboro.
“Their food habits are part of their public-relations problem,” Schlosser wrote. “People find it disturbing that these magnificent creatures eat dead animals, even large ones.”
That diet, though macabre, keeps fields and roadways clean and helps keep down carcass-spread diseases their own stomachs can tolerate.
But no one in Bunn can offer clues about why their town, just 25 miles northeast of Raleigh, attracts so many winged scavengers. Other towns have their share of roadkill and garbage bins, a buzzard’s delight.
In the mean time, Massey recently told town officials he would step up enforcement of trash-bin regulations in an effort to reduce non-natural meal options for the buzzards, the Franklin Times reported.
But at Bunn’s Do It Center hardware store on Main Street, the proprietors carry no repellent, only the memory of the time buzzards ate the roof vents off the nearby Chinese restaurant.
As this memory inspired a chorus of shaken heads and “What are you gonna dos,” another six buzzards landed on Leggett’s house. They settled on what is left of the chimney.
