This school has a problem. The solution is dead vultures

The group had been gathering around the football field and greenhouse at Fauquier High School for years. They didn’t cause too much trouble until they started hanging around the animals on the school farm.

That’s when the phone started ringing.

At least once a week, according to a teacher, a passerby would report that something must have happened to one of the animals. Why else would hundreds of black vultures be swarming the livestock?

Each time, Susan Hilleary, the agriculture teacher at the Virginia school about 60 miles south and west of D.C., which has facilities and livestock to teach kids about farming, said she paused her class and darted outside to check on the animals. And each time the pigs, chickens and goats were fine.

Finally in October, it all became too much to manage – the constant phone calls, the growing committee, the poop everywhere. Hilleary said she decided that the vultures had to go.

But how do you get rid of hundreds of massive birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 with few legal ways to disperse them?

First, Hilleary said she contacted the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources and the U.S. Agriculture Department. She connected with a biologist in the area who could help. They developed a plan and ran it up the chain. School administration signed on. Then she turned to the town of Warrenton’s zoning department.

She penned an email to staff: Could she please hang two dead vultures in the trees?

There were few other options, Hilleary explained. She and her students could run out banging pots and pans to scare off the birds, but that, of course, was not a sustainable solution. Other sound or pyrotechnic approaches commonly used to scare off the birds would be too much of a nuisance.

Hanging carcasses was recommended by the USDA biologist as the most effective and least disruptive way to ward off the birds, according to Hilleary’s correspondence with the town. They could use fakes, though in Fauquier’s case, the biologist proposed using real, dead birds, according to correspondence with Hilleary.

“Apparently live vultures are offended and will not return to where their brethren are hanging dead,” Hilleary explained in an email to town staff.

Town zoning manager Heather Jenkins told Hilleary in an email that the staff at town hall preferred to use a method other than hanging the dead vultures, “as this could pose a public nuisance due to potential for odor and objectionable views.” But, Jenkins wrote, “if hanging vultures in effigy is the only workable method, then this would need to be submitted to Town Council for approval.”

So, Hilleary penned a letter, this time to the council, with her plea to hang the carcasses.

She explained that the live birds could carry disease and pose a threat to the animals on the farm and the students who care for them. There would be two dead ones and it would cost about $400 for the biologist to come set things up. Only the government, she said, has access to the carcasses, which are reused from “other projects.” They’d dangle above the pig pens, mostly out of sight from students and the public, for about a month before decomposing.

“The effigies will not be a public nuisance, unlike the committee of vultures who roost here daily,” Hilleary wrote in the letter. “The wildlife biologist confirms that the smell of the decaying effigy is minimal.

“The vultures on the other hand are an extreme nuisance.”

On Tuesday morning, the town council discussed the request. They asked about other options and raised concerns that the effigies are not always successful in permanently warding off the birds. Ultimately they agreed to the request, and later that afternoon, approved it in a unanimous vote.

Hilleary would get the effigies.

In an interview, the 62-year-old teacher said it’s still not a done deal. She has to finalize the installation with the USDA biologist. But, she said, the process was a great learning experience for students at the school, about 180 of whom are enrolled in the agriculture program. In her animal sciences class, she teaches a lesson on wildlife interfering with livestock. This was an opportunity for a real-life problem-solving exercise on the topic.

It was also a chance to learn how to navigate government bureaucracy and about all the hoops you often have to jump through to legally procure and hang a couple of vulture carcasses on a high school campus.

For all the other vultures to see.