
The vultures of Spain skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy - isp
https://twitter.com/TurbanMinor/status/1113352919301218304
======
squeaky-clean
The way everyone is writing this off as so obvious is annoying. Have you guys
never found a bug that in retrospect was glaringly obvious, but all the
symptoms looked bizarre until you found what made them all connected? This is
a fun story the same way the "500 mile email limit" story is a fun story. Yeah
the idea of "your timeout is so low that it times out unless you're sending a
very local request, about 500 miles" is obvious and somewhat boring in
retrospect too, but that twist is what makes them both fun stories/facts.

~~~
edge17
Actually, this reminded me about the impact pesticides etc. have had on Parsi
death rights in India. Parsi people rely on birds of prey to consume their
dead bodies in Dakhma's (structures intended for dead bodies to be exposed to
birds that consume carrion). Due to the destruction of the population it's
basically become much more difficult.

More to read here if interested -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence#In_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence#In_India)

~~~
jfk13
I think you probably meant "death rites" (not "rights").

~~~
jessaustin
Presumably they have rights to their rites.

~~~
_AzMoo
That is a fairly strong assumption for a good chunk of the world.

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m12k
Reminds me of this explanation of why during the 2012 election, Obama won the
counties where the most prehistoric plankton had died:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/o...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama-
s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin)

~~~
tobr
In short: plankton -> fertile soil -> cotton farms -> slavery -> African-
American votes.

------
personlurking
In case anyone is interested

Great Big Story: The Vultureman of Spain (3m14s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQKaYUEknCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQKaYUEknCU)

"Manuel Aguilera wants you to know there’s no reason to fear vultures. The
ornithological guide has gone as far as climbing into an animal carcass to get
closer to the birds of prey. He’s spent 40 years studying the griffon vulture,
and has dedicated his career to changing peoples’ perceptions of the birds,
hoping to have others realize that they are majestic creatures to revere and
protect."

~~~
celticninja
Knowing they are scavengers I would not be afraid of them, by the time they
bother you you will be dead. They won't attack anyone who has any way to
defend themselves.

~~~
rusk
> you will be desd

our dsying …

~~~
dang
We fixed the typo.

------
opwieurposiu
I have seen elk wander back and forth across an invisible boundary all year,
but the first day of hunting season you can bet they will not put one hoof
into the game unit.

~~~
mc32
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the behavior has nothing to do with
knowing a border but rather something important to vultures: lack of carrion
on the other side because people on the other side observe different laws
pertaining to animal disposal.

~~~
Ensorceled
Right, that's their point: game, elk/deer/moose, will avoid areas where there
are active hunters and seem to have a sixth sense about where those boundaries
are, for instance retreating to game preserves on the first day of the hunting
season for similar reasons to why the vultures respect borders (prey vs.
predators)

~~~
gruez
>[...] for instance retreating to game preserves on the first day of the
hunting season [...]

I doubt that animals can tie obesrable phenomna (eg. lunar cycles or solar
azimuth) to a human calendar date with day level accuracy, because of how
small the differences between each day is and how arbitrary the human calendar
can be. It's much more likely it's due to human activity such as increased
traffic noises/gun shots on the start of the hunting season.

~~~
celticninja
Birds migrate seasonally no reason an elk can't learn the need to migrate.
Perhaps"day one of hunting season" is hyperbole but the jist may be true.

------
jorge-d
It's funny because they even avoid Olivença, which is De Facto in Spanish side
of the border but is disputed.

Vultures knows what country it should belong to \s

~~~
javierga
I googled this because if your comment and found out about the sovereignty
issues. I had never heard about this conflict in my life.

I guess if I was to ask the average Brit about the sovereignty conflict with
Spain regarding Gibraltar they would probably be non the wiser...

~~~
athenot
There are a few others in Europe, in particular the Mont Blanc. Though in
practice, it doesn't affect day-to-day life.

[https://www.politico.eu/article/peak-of-discord-mont-
blanc-e...](https://www.politico.eu/article/peak-of-discord-mont-blanc-europe-
border-france-italy/)

------
DoreenMichele
_10 / It's not just vultures at stake: the collection, transportation and
disposal of dead animals is costly and polluting._

Maybe Tibetan Buddhists, who feed their dead to vultures as a form of burial,
are on to something.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376190/Chopped-
fed...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376190/Chopped-fed-vultures-
glimpse-closely-guarded-tradition-Tibetan-sky-funeral.html)

~~~
berkes
I wonder if, given enough distance, this is actually a really good way to
avoid deceases.

Burying or burning is a good "rite" or meme, that will avoid many deceases. In
the way that it favours cultures who dispose of their dead this way, have a
benefit over those who leave them "lying around", so to say.

Would a sky-burial work similar? Or does that simply spread the risk of
contamination over a large area that it only helps cultures in really sparse
areas?

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Vultures play a critical role in disease control and waste removal. They are
actually one of the most important scavengers in Africa and are believed to
consume even more carrion than mammalian scavengers like hyenas. Vultures also
eat rapidly and feed in large groups which allows them to consume carrion
quickly. This reduces the risk of disease spread from flies or bacteria.
Vultures are resistant to many diseases so they don’t contract or spread
diseases like tuberculosis or brucellosis even if the animals they are
consuming died from those causes._

[https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/02/02/endangered-
vu...](https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/02/02/endangered-vultures-
critical-to-disease-control-in-africa/)

------
socialist_coder
I think the funniest part of this story is how much Portugal spends on the
corpse removal & burning. The vultures do the job for free!

Another example of this is in The Biggest Little Farm. The farmers have a
problem with gophers. The "traditional" ways of handling gophers are all very
expensive or have bad side effects. They figure out that if they attract owls
to their farm by building owl houses, the owls take care of the gophers.

Both of those are good examples of letting nature work for you, rather than
you trying to work against nature. For humans to have a sustainable future for
tens of thousands of more years, I think we need to figure out how to work
side-by-side with nature rather than try to bend nature to our will.

~~~
rozab
It reminds me of an article posted on HN a while back [0] about how zebra
mussels have helped clean up Lake Erie. It's written by a modern druid, who
laments that humans so often avoid the ecological solutions mother nature has
provided us.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20359876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20359876)

~~~
eric_h
> zebra mussels have helped clean up Lake Erie [...] modern druid, who laments
> that humans so often avoid the ecological solutions mother nature has
> provided us.

Zebra mussels are an invasive species that were transported to Lake Erie (and
the rest of the Great Lakes) via unnatural and unintentional methods. They
also make murky water more clear which does not have anything to do with how
clean or healthy a body of water is.

They're more like cane toads in Australia than the restoration of the wolf
population in Yellowstone.

But apparently they make for bigger salmon in Lake Ontario
[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878434...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87843464)
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
foxhop
Often less is more. One might say, let the animals work!

Nature's solutions and systems are almost always the most efficient, whether
regarding to energy, time, or health.

------
rossdavidh
From the thread: "Representatives of BirdLife International, a nature
conservation partnership, in both countries argue wildlife will benefit from
the integration of sanitary policies across European borders." ...but I was
thinking the exact opposite. Because at least they didn't have BOTH countries
doing this, the vulture population can survive in decent numbers on the
Spanish side, and whenever Portugal comes around the vultures will figure it
out and come back. But, if Spain and Portugal had both, for years, reduced the
supply of food available to vultures, the population would have either died
off or had to move much further away.

Sometimes, avoiding a big mistake everywhere is more important than avoiding a
big mistake anywhere.

------
perlgeek
Talking to a foreign ATC is just too much of a hassle... :-)

------
thaumasiotes
"The vultures of Spain skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny
accuracy" is a stunningly dishonest way to report this. Based on the pictures
supposedly supporting this headline, which open the thread... if you had the
vulture data and didn't know where the borders were, you would be totally
unable to guess where the borders were.

Rather, most of Portugal is included within a larger region where vultures
mostly don't go, because they can't find food there.

------
PedroBatista
Portuguese farmers don't bury dead wild animals, so obviously there are
vultures in Portugal too.

Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally
abundance of dead cattle, just a thought.

Also, it's nice to be an arm-chair environmentalist as long as that dead cow
isn't rotting next to your house.

~~~
shkkmo
> Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally
> abundance of dead cattle, just a thought.

Pasture lands decrease habitat that would support the wild animal populations
that would normally feed the vultures. Are you aware of any numbers indicating
an unnaturally high vulture population?

> Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because of the unnaturally
> abundance of dead cattle, just a thought.

Nobody is trying to make the removal of corpses from inappropriate places
illegal. They are trying to make it legal to leave some corpses in place.

~~~
pvaldes
> Maybe there are too many vultures in Spain because

Because good and hard work

In Spain there is a recent strong culture of protecting this birds, as result
of the work for the last decades of several spanish associations like Fapas,
Seo Birdlife or Grefa.

And because money

The farmers in this places are supposed to pay for removing dead sheep and
cattle corpses by law, but they often pretend that the cattle was lost, look
to other point whereas the vultures do the job for free and save the money.

------
eitland
This subthread made me smile - and then think:

Krishna Shamanth @KrishnaShamanth

Apr 9 I've seen them vanish.. Very sad.. Whenever I visit a village, I look
for vultures... Nowhere to be seen... I guess they all reborn as govt
employees of some divisions and politicians.

Lizanne Whitlow @LizanneWhitlow

Apr 9 The cleanup crews are very necessary in our world

------
hevi_jos
Well given than in Spain vultures are feeded by the remains of butchers, while
in Portugal those remains are burned down(I believe), it is not a big
surprise.

I have seen them being feeded in mountains at the north of Spain called Picos
de Europa:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picos_de_Europa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picos_de_Europa)

Laws change abruptly across boundaries, so it is not a surprise that vultures
know when they are feeded or not.

Birds or animals are not stupid. Animals that are hunted know exactly when the
hunting season starts and ends. I have seen deer separate in sexes when the
hunting ban expires(because the law forbids females to be hunted down), so you
will see females with offspring completely relaxed in front of people.

------
pier25
> _Spanish farmers don’t collect dead cattle, but in Portugal, they must bury
> or burn all carcasses. This leaves no food for vultures, who have learned
> that the grass is always greener on the eastern side._

Case closed.

~~~
jcahill
Why? What's the genesis of this difference? Does it have a tie-in to, say, a
famous public health crisis? Who says there are no vultures on the Portugal
side? Where can I learn more, if I want? Who works on this stuff? Pictures?

The short-form summary that provides this requires the same number of clicks
to reach from HN as your comment.

~~~
soared
What? Click the link and scroll down - it answers this question.

I won't enable you with an answer here, but it is a very interesting answer :)

~~~
jcahill
You should re-read my comment.

~~~
swsieber
Your comment had put the punchline at the end, instead of the beginning, which
is almost the same issue you're complaining about in the comment. Not only do
you point out the issue with words, but with form as well. :)

"Why is the comment so long? Why did I have to read to the end to figure out
what your complaint was?"

~~~
hcs
I think jcahill's complaint is that pier25's quote leaves out important
details, and the original thread is short enough to read.

------
klhugo
You definitely can not say the same about Canada geese :)

~~~
qqn
Fun fact: they're actually called "Canada geese",
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose).

~~~
klhugo
Thanks!

------
tr3ndyBEAR
Could the fact that the Spain/Portugal border is influenced by geography also
be a major factor? Both the border and the birds' flight patterns are likely
heavily influenced by geography

~~~
bnegreve
It's not just the first tweet, read the whole thread.

> The Portuguese-Spanish border follows river valleys and is not associated
> with abrupt changes in climate or land-use.

> The reasons for the mismatch are historical. In 2001, Europe’s answer to the
> mad-cow disease (BSE) crisis was banning the abandonment of dead livestock.
> [...] [Conservationists] convinced European Union legislators to delegate
> the choice to member states. Some countries, like Spain, resumed cattle
> abandonment under special conditions. Portugal never changed its laws.

------
umvi
No matter what the story is, someone will always post the comment "In other
news, water is wet" or "No news here, this has been known for 10 years" or
something to that effect.

All bugs are shallow given enough eyeballs, I suppose.

~~~
Stratoscope
Yeah, any old vulture could have told you about this.

------
microtherion
Apparently, "vautours sans frontières" is not a thing…

------
jcahill
Half of the comments: low-attention, high-misery demands that an already short
summary of an interesting phenomenon be shortened to the minimum number of
words possible, presented like it's not worthy of arousing your curiosity.

The other half: people who didn't read the link providing baseless conjecture.

Good stuff. Curiosity bad. 200-comment threads about minor releases of
enterprise middleware only.

~~~
dang
Alas, comments like this one perpetuate the problem you're complaining about,
actually in a worse way because second-order phenomena are harder to deal
with. For example, low-value dismissals tend to get downvoted and supplanted
by better comments. But indignant meta-rants tend to get upvoted and sit at
the top of the page, giving off fumes. That's where this one was until I
marked it off-topic.

Believe me I understand the annoyance of bad comments and shallow dismissals,
but trying to fight them this way just makes the threads worse.

~~~
jcahill
Now there's simply another meta comment at the top. When you mark that one
off-topic, an irrelevant anecdote about elk that suggests possibly-not-
reading-the-article will be on top.

~~~
dang
That comment does start out with a meta criticism, but then it turns into a
much better comment by saying something fun and interesting about the article,
which gratifies curiosity in its own right.

The one about elk isn't irrelevant: it describes a comparable situation.
Better still, it's based in personal experience. Anecdotes are fine—they're
the life-blood of good conversation, and HN threads are supposed to be good
conversations [1]. We're not doing peer-reviewed replication here.

That's perhaps the real problem with the comments you've been posting in this
thread: they're bad for conversation because they're bilious. Bile is a
bummer.

1\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20conversation%20anecdote&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
jcahill
I was about to follow up my meta comment with a regular comment about river
basin mapping and bird migration viz until your reply about the off-topic
flag. Defense of curiosity for its own sake is a preface for conversation.

Noting disappointment in people being miserable about something interesting,
which in itself totally disinvites on-topic conversation, isn't bile. I can't
ask people to read the article per the site rules, even though it's painfully
apparent that half the problem is lack of nudging to read the article. So of
course dissent is going to be colder than it could otherwise be.

~~~
dang
> a regular comment about river basin mapping and bird migration viz

That sounds great! That's the way to combat bad comments, by posting better
ones. I'm sorry if I put you out of the mood for that. Please reconsider?

------
netsharc
Ah, click-bait in 280 characters?

TL;DR (or "A lengthy summary posted using Twitter's clunky 'thread' feature;
didn't read"): Portugal has laws that require farmers to dispose off their
dead cattle, Spain doesn't.

~~~
darkwater
According to your definition of click-bait title, I would say that almost all
the human literature would be "click-bait".

~~~
bpodgursky
That's not true? The "traditional" essay begins with a topic paragraph and a
thesis statement, with later paragraphs supporting that assertion.

Only new-form, gotta-read-to-the-end journalism hides the interesting lede at
the end.

------
trhway
Many borders follow natural features like say a mountain ridge, and such
features affects air movement patterns, humidity/clouds, etc.

~~~
alejohausner
The article points out that this is NOT the cause. The border between Spain
and Portugal crosses all sorts of divides and watersheds: the Tagus river
starts in Spain, passes near Madrid, travels west, and empties into the
Atlantic in Lisbon. In fact, 3/4 of the Iberian peninsula has rivers that feed
the Atlantic, and the divide between rivers that feed the Atlantic and those
that feed the Mediterranean is way on the East side of Spain, far from the
political border with Portugal.

------
vumgl
Vultures can fly over the border but their nests and young offsprings can't.
Maybe this small restriction got some influence over their flight patterns
over time.

~~~
ceejayoz
The border is an imaginary line.

