This post expands a single sentence on page 134 in Chapter 12 Birds and Bees: Wildlife in the Palms in my book, The Palmetto Book: Histories and Mysteries of the Cabbage Palm, published by the University of Florida Press.
I mention in passing that vultures roost on cabbage palms, “breaking down the leaves with their weight.” I recently visited Hontoon Island State Park, near Deland, Florida and before taking the free ferry ride over, I noticed what appeared to be some very stressed cabbage palms on Google Earth.
It could have been a disease outbreak or some other mortality event, but I suspected it was a vulture roost. Vultures like to perch in dead oaks, but their roosts are frequently in cabbage palms.
It was easy to find, more or less south of the developed dock area. One clue was guano-spattered palm fronds that had been trimmed from the roadside (for clearance).
The combination of molted feathers, guano, and ammonia odor made it easy to use our eyes and noses to locate the roost. The visual and olfactory clues were supplemented by hearing some of their laborious wing flaps. This was a black vulture roost.
Once inside (underneath really) the roost, we saw some birds hopping about on the ground. Black vultures, which we typically imagine soaring above, are no strangers on land. In fact, they nest and raise their heavy, down-coated chicks on the ground.
The image below shows the typical aspect of a cabbage palm that has been used as a vulture roost: a vertical spear leaf and all the other fronds trampled down.
