3x the Carrion

I've decided recently to just blog about whatever the hell I feel like. To give up the ghost, and at least sometimes admit that running isn't always a metaphor for life (though most of the time, it is--not my fault, sorry folks). To sometimes just ramble.

I could blog about last week's sweaty 3 miles around the Charles in what seemed like excruciating morning heat. I could blog about yesterday's 3 miles around the Charles in what actually was excruciating morning heat (I think today topped out at 95 degrees). I could even throw in a pithy blog about actually hauling myself out of bed to lift with my beloved this morning.

Or, I could talk about vultures. Let me start with a couple of comments on vultures:

The turkey vulture has a V-shaped wingspan and a white head. Unlike eagles, vultures tend to glide for longer periods of time.

When they fly around in a cluster, it's called a kettle. If there's a whole colony of vultures, that's called a vulture venue.

-Henry Harnish

There's a lot of interesting information available on these flesh-eating creatures of carrion--they are scavenging birds found on every continent outside of Antarctica and Oceania.

Though they typically eat the already dead, they're known to pick off the wounded, injured, or starving creatures for a meal.

According to Wikipedia, "[Vultures] gorge themselves when prey is abundant, till their crop bulges, and sit, sleepy or half torpid, to digest their food." To that end, vultures have been found in droves in battlefields.

Though many are unaware of it, vultures also possess a dangerously strategic mind. Indeed, they are some of nature's most brilliant tacticians, and are known for mental machinations, such as the most famous maneuver, in which the vulture or vultures appear to have consumed all the carrion they need and fly away, leaving only a wounded animal. What the poor creature does not know, though, is that the vulture is only biding its time. This strategy is meant to lure the wounded creature's herd out into the open, thereby providing a larger feast for the deadly scavenger. This is only one of several tricks up the vulture's sleeve.

It's enough to make a runner start speedwork.