Red-Headed Turkey Vultures

I've always been an animal lover.  I lived in town the first five years of my life and had one cat and two dogs.   I was born, I was five, then when we moved to the country.  Blackberry was our cat's name and she was a pure black long-haired little furball with golden eyes.  One dog's name was Buc and he was an English Setter.  He had a black spot over one eye so hence the name...Buckeye or Buc for short!  The other dog's name was Paddles.  He was a tri-colored Beagle. My mom named him Paddles because when he took off running his little ears looked like paddles attached to a Jon boat rowing in the water!!  These three animals were my first experiences with pets and turned me into the pet lover I am today...sort of!

45 years ago...we lived on the edge of town, one block from the elementary school I attended through 8th grade.  Across the alley from our house was a nursing home.  Having a nursing home behind your home brought much activity to one's life.  My brother, sister and I were always playing outside in our backyard or at any of our neighborhood friends' yards around the block.  We were outside from sun-up til sundown and it didn't seem to matter what time of year it was either.  One routine my sister and I got into the habit of was visiting the residents of the nursing home.  I have no idea what my mother was thinking letting us go over there unattended, but it was the 70's...I was four or five and my sister was six or seven!  My sister and I would go door to door.  Our Great-Aunt Clytie was there so we would go see her first.  My favorite resident was an old man named Gene because he was really funny and he always let me help myself to some of his Brach's Rootbeer Barrel candy.

Somedays though...more like MANY days...we would hear the dogs barking and look out the back door and there would be a runner.  Agnes was the best at running away, but Katherine was "running" a very close second.  Is it sad we had the nursing home number memorized...429-2134?  I think it is more sad that I still know the number!  We would call and narc out the runaways...half the time they were still in their nightgowns or robes.  After my five years of life there on the corner of Country Road and Vermont Streets, the nursing home planned to build a new facility on the west edge of town.   Once they moved in to their new place they sold the old one to Elm Acres.  Back then, it was a home for troubled boys and girls.  Boys on one wing, girls on the other.  After about a year of these troubled teens walking in front of our house (usually smoking cigarettes) or even cutting through our backyard, my parents had enough.  Things were getting stolen and the teens were mean to us when they were headed back to the home after school.  Needless-to-say, my parents put our house up for sale and it sold within 8 hours of being put on the market!  Since the house sold so fast, we moved to a really cool rental house out in the country, almost to the Oklahoma state line.  While living there I joined 4-H once I turned 8-years-old and I was able to talk my parents into letting me have my first pig to raise and show at the county fair...his name was Wilbur.  I will tell you more about Wilbur in another blog AND my experiences in 4-H in another.

While we lived out on the prairie (as my mom called it), we only ever had dogs, cats, and the pigs.  We did bring Blackberry, Buc and Paddles with us, but they eventually died.  After living on the priairie for about six years, my parents built the home they live in today.  We moved but weren't allowed to have any more pets after two of our dogs (Josie and Iggie) were killed out on the highway.  We became crop farmers at our new home on the range.  We didn't have cows or chickens or goats or sheep, but we did have wild turkeys, deer, coyotes, opossum, armadillos and raccoons.  Rabbits...plenty of rabbits.  Rabbits galore!!!  My grandma had horses though and my uncle had cows, but we lived where the wild things roamed!

As I got older, mom gave in and we had a couple of Siamese cats Jonathan Denver and Simon.   Bozz and Milo came later and I had a lavender-tip Siamese that was registered and named Alvin when I moved out on my own.  Alvin could even play fetch!  Mom also had a Maine Coon a few years back named Fats.  She called him Dasher, but he couldn't "dash" anywhere because he was so fat which is why my dad started calling him Fats instead.   Callie, Crush, Astrid, Kittay, and Richard are more cats that the kids have had over the years.  I've had parakeets...Harold, Sprite, and Booker and Hannah had one named London that flew out the front door one day the neighbor boys came over and their dog ate it!  Gracie has a Cockatiel now named Primrose.   We have had a round with a Hamster named Gertrude and a couple of Hermit Crabs...Truman and Twain.   Lots of Beta Fish have lived at our house over the years also.  The girls have had two bunnies...Aspen and Annie...and then there's the dogs...Willie, Iggie, Josie, Jack, Ace, Zack, Pryo, Raider, Puppy, Ellie, Lucy, Hope, Adele, Karma and Jasmine.

50 years later...I am almost fizzled out when it comes to OWNING a pet.  After owning many and letting my kids have many more pets that I ever should have agreed to...or not because they drug them home anyway...I probably will no longer have any desires to ever own another pet again.

Yesterday, as I'm driving home from Fredonia, Kansas I look up at an old barn and see two red-headed turkey vultures perched up on the ridge.  I've always thought red-headed turkey vultures were so ugly they were quite cute!  They look like the California Condor when they are in flight and their wingspan is quite grand.  Red-headed turkey vultures look so majestic as they swirl through the bright blue skys that they almost take your breath away...I wonder what it would be like to have a red-headed turkey vulture as a pet?