Among the many reasons people envy those of us able to live here in the Kern River Valley is not only the clean air and water we enjoy in this part of the Sequoia National Forest, the marvelous fishing and lack of traffic, the lack of crowds when shopping or attending to other business but also the abundance of birds and butterflies, so much so that people from around the world come here just to be able to see such a marvelous diversity of these beautiful creatures. And while pollution elsewhere in so many parts of America threaten both people and wildlife the very abundance of birds and butterflies testify to the quality of our environment here in this very special place.
However, while not considered beautiful we have an abundance of turkey vultures and the 14th Annual Kern Valley Autumn Nature & Vulture Festival here in the Kern River Valley was held on September 27-28. When speaking of vultures most can be excused for immediately thinking of politicians, however that is ameliorated somewhat here in the valley because of the great number of actual turkey vultures in the wild, sometimes in such large flocks overhead right here in Bodfish Canyon as to make one think the sky had suddenly turned cloudy.
The Kern Valley Sun: The Turkey Vulture Festival had its beginnings when locals Terri Gallion and Sean Rowe, under the auspices of the Kern River Research center, began formally documenting what is considered the largest turkey vulture migration over a single location north of Mexico in 1994. The event is now the focus of the annual two-day event that monitors a consistently healthy bird population. “We’ll see an average of about 30,000 vultures annually along the migration route in the South Fork Valley,” says Alison Sheehey, Outreach Program Coordinator for the Kern River Preserve, “with a good day count being about 4,000 birds. Our counts are also critical to the ongoing military activities in the area. A group of 4,000 vultures can pose a serious problem to aircraft, and we furnish information to the military to help prevent any potentially catastrophic contact with the birds.” The Kern Valley Turkey Vulture Festival is sponsored by Audubon–California, Kern River Valley Revitalization Committee, and Friends of the Kern River Preserve. The Audubon organization is dedicated to protecting birds and wildlife and the habitat that supports them. “A lot of people come out for the vulture festival,” says Sheehey, “but we have many activities going on at the Preserve year round, including our work with hummingbirds and migratory butterflies, like the Painted Ladies we see coming through the area. Come out and pay us a visit. We have a new visitor center now being built, which should make things even nicer in the future.”
In these most uncertain of times I am grateful to God for things like the Annual Turkey Vulture Count, a kind of sanity in the midst of so much seeming insanity. And while they are equated with death vultures play a vital role in cleansing the earth of carrion, but someday there will be new heavens and a new earth and there will be no need of vultures since death will be swallowed up by God’s plan for our future, a future where neither death nor anything unclean will any longer have a place in the scheme of things.
It is understandable there are people that envy those of us able to live here in the Kern River Valley, but I pity those that have no faith in God wherever they live. How very bleak their lives must be to have no hope beyond what this world has to offer, to have no hope beyond the grave, and because of this lack of faith and hope in God and a hereafter spend their lives much like politicians and other of the Devil’s servants attacking those with such faith and hope.
