Hi, I'm Rob. Tale number sixty-nine. Picked clean. I live in a smallish town. It feels like a small town, but there's a military base nearby, so it's actually bigger than your normal small town. And there's a little downtown area, and sometimes I go to the library in that downtown area to do work or read or whatever. One day I was doing that. I was I was at the library working, and they closed for lunch for an hour and a half. And so I needed to go and wait somewhere until lunch break was over and I could come back to the library. And the library is in the middle of like a revitalization project that's going on downtown. There are lots of new government buildings around, there's some new sidewalks, and there's a food truck park right across the street, but there's never any food trucks there. But there are a lot of picnic tables, so that's where I decide to go. As I'm making my way to a picnic table, some commotion catches my eye to my right, and across the road from the food truck park is this big open lawn. The grass is short, it's been recently cut, and it's a place like where you can go play fetch with your dog or something like that. But on this day there are no dogs being played with. There's a large group of vultures, probably fifteen or twenty. I love vultures, and they're eating something that's dead, and I'm curious about what they're eating, so I walk across the road and take a look. And I'm a little surprised by what I see, because there's two things that they're eating, a dead raccoon and a dead fox. It looks like they're about halfway finished with the raccoon. There's definitely some exposed bone and a lot of fur, but they haven't gotten as far into the fox yet. It's mostly intact. I see a bench pretty nearby, so I decide to sit there instead of at the food truck park. I have my computer with me so I can do some work and watch the vultures at the same time. It's mostly black vultures and then one turkey vulture. I'm sure you've seen both species before. You know, vultures, they don't have feathers on their head, and turkey vultures their head is pink in color, and black vultures, their head is black. Um I don't know a lot about vultures. I do know that turkey vultures have a really strong sense of smell, so they can find dead things to eat really easily. And then black vultures don't have that sense of smell, so they just follow turkey vultures around. But then turkey vultures usually aren't in huge groups, and black vultures are in big groups, so once the turkey vulture finds the food, the black vultures come in and kind of bully the turkey vulture out of the way and eat the dead animal. And that's what I was witnessing, I think, this back and forth at these carcasses between the black vultures and the turkey vulture. And again, the black vultures outnumbered the turkey vulture like 15 to 1. The turkey vulture did get in there and eat. Like it would move in, grab a bite, and then get chased away by the black vultures, and then it would come back and get another bite and get chased away again. So it was eating, even though it was almost constantly getting chased away from the carcasses by the black vultures. And I had never really heard the vocalizations that vultures make, but they're nothing like a bird. You might expect a crow or maybe something like a hawk. If I had closed my eyes and you asked me to guess what I was listening to, it would have been puppies playing tug of war. Like they weren't yelping, but that closed mouth growling sound when dogs are pulling on something. And I was watching that and they were pulling pieces off the raccoon and pulling pieces off of the fox. It was great. And then I heard a car pull in behind me at the food truck park. They parked on the side of the road and got out, and it was a young man and a young woman and a photographer, and they were there to take engagement photos. I guess they had picked this spot because again it was like the revitalized part of town, repaved roads, new streetlights, new sidewalks, lots of recent landscaping. For this area, it's probably a nice spot to get a good background for an engagement photo. The only problem with that plan is there are fifteen vultures flying around fighting over a dead raccoon and a dead fox. The photographer had visited the spot earlier in the week and planned the angles she wanted for every photo. And every sort of angle and background she had selected, the vultures were going to be in the photo. So now she was sort of panicking, but they were trying to pivot and find a shot that the vultures didn't show up in. They found an angle everyone liked and took some photos. And then more people started showing up. I'd never seen engagement photos where like the family was involved, but in this case, mothers and fathers and friends showed up, and now the photographer wanted to mix things up, but they really only had one angle because they couldn't get away from the vultures. People were starting to get mad. Phone calls were being made to the city to see if anything could be done. They had a big lunch planned and this was taking longer than it was supposed to, so it was delaying their arrival time to their restaurant, and they were worried that they were going to lose the reservation or it was going to cost more money. And I was sitting there in all this just kind of watching from my bench. There were two paths that my mind was going down at that moment. One was why was there a dead raccoon and a dead fox in the exact same place? Like that seemed weird to me. How did both animals get to the same spot? And they were way off the road, so it wasn't a situation where like the raccoon had been hit by a car, and then the fox had shown up and started eating the dead raccoon, and then the fox was hit by a car. It looked like the carcasses had been moved there, or in my mind I thought maybe they had been dragged there by other animals. And then the other thing was the people were arguing about food. The vultures were arguing about food. If someone could get like a really wide shot that included the engagement photo group and the vultures, I don't like taking photos of people without asking them, so I wasn't going to do it, but it would have been a cool photo. And around that time, the wind shifted. And so I've been watching this the whole time and it has smelled fine. I hadn't smelled any death smell. But when the wind shifted, that decomposition smell started drifting towards me and the folks taking the engagement photos. You could hear the smell move into that group of people because there was a lot of groaning and coughing, and it was just strong smell. And this made the crowd of people which were sorta mad, very mad. You can just feel the pressure rising. They wanted to get out of there, but they still needed to take one photo with everyone in it. And so they're sort of frantically trying to get that together, trying to find an angle with no vultures in it. And then a white pickup truck showed up, parked on the side of the road closest to the vultures. I think everyone thought it was someone from the county or the city here to do something about the situation. That's what I thought it was. It looked like a work truck. A guy got out of the truck and he put on some leather work gloves. Then he got a five gallon bucket out of his truck, and he made his way towards the fox and the raccoon, and I think we were all thinking he was gonna pick 'em up and put them in the bucket. Then if he could just move the dead animals, the vultures would follow. Which was disappointing to me. I wanted them to stay, but I understood that their location was not ideal. But when he got to the carcasses, instead of picking the animals up, he tipped the bucket over, and a dead cat plopped out of it onto the ground right by the raccoon and the fox. It was very damaged and had obviously been hit by a car or many cars. And then he turned around and slowly walked back to his truck, and then he put the bucket in the back of his truck, took his gloves off, threw those in the back of the truck. And then I'll never forget this part, I don't know why, but then he turned and looked back where he had dumped the dead cat, and he just stared at it for like a minute, and the vultures finally jumped onto it and started picking at it, and he smiled. And it wasn't a sinister smile, it was more of a smile of satisfaction. Because I think this guy had dumped the raccoon and the fox too. I don't know if he worked for the government or if he was just a local guy, but I think he was gathering roadkill and dumping it, and it made him smile to see the vultures doing what they do. And I get that. And then he got in his truck and drove away. And we all just sat there in silence, as the vultures growled, grumbled, and tore at the fresh meat that had just been presented to them. It zapped the energy out of the people, they took their photo and got out of there. And I just sort of sat there in awe. And then I made my way back to the library, worked for a little while longer, and then headed home. A few days later I was driving by that spot. There were no vultures, no roadkill. I stopped and walked over, and all that remained of the cat, the fox, and the raccoon were bones that had been picked clean. Rob Tells Tales is produced by me, Rob Tiffin. Our theme music is by Mitchell Harditch. Our cover art is by Marcella Johnson. She also came up with the title of the podcast. Thanks to everyone who talks through these episodes with me before I record them. There are too many to list. And thanks to you for listening.