The Black Vulture in Colorado
The Black Vulture in Colorado
On October 8 or 9, 1921, two young schoolboys, Richard Harvey and a boy named Baer, captured alive, on the foothills near Boulder, an adult male Black Vulture (Coragyps urubu urubu), breaking its wing. They tied it in a neighbor's yard to keep it alive until the University of Colorado Museum preparator returned from a short trip, but the neighbor turned it loose just out of town. A few days later two other boys, Elvin Watson and James Mitchell, found it dead in a ditch and brought it to the Museum, where its skin is now preserved. So far as I know there is no published record of this species for Colorado, and it is particularly interesting to find the first one for the state so far north. In 1900 Professor W. W. Cooke, in his Second Appendix to The Birds of Colorado (page 204) stated that the Black Vulture “has been taken in Western Kansas and probably will some time be found as a rare summer visitant in Southeastern Colorado”; but Boulder is 270 miles northwest of the southeastern corner of the state.
Junius Henderson
University of Colorado, Boulder, October 25, 1921
