Vulture Update

Back in July of 2008 I brought you the bizarre story of the Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin, and its unfortunate tenure as the roosting spot for a flock of turkey vultures. For those of you who missed it, you can find the story here if you want to. As I noted at the time, the birds didn’t really pose any threat to human life, let alone to patients at the hospital, since they won’t attack any living creature (vultures eat carrion almost exclusively) and they don’t carry anything that people can catch (vultures are surprisingly disease-free creatures, considering their diet). Nevertheless, patients were complaining because, in fairness, it can be rather disconcerting to wake up in the hospital and find a vulture perched on your windowsill. Now it turns out that the people at the Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin should have been counting their blessings…

According to a story being reported this week in USA Today by way of Delaware Online, a woman in Ridgeway, Virginia is under siege by a flock of 200 or so black vultures, which are eating the roof off of her house. It turns out that this species of vulture likes to chew on rubber, and the unfortunate in our story owns the only house with rubber shingles on the roof anywhere in the neighborhood. Each day 30 or 35 individual birds turn up to munch on the roof, which is now leaking and causing a great deal of distress to the owner, given the winter weather in Ridgeway. Even worse, the vultures are too smart and aggressive to scare away, and Federal law protecting migratory birds makes it illegal to kill them. You might be able to get a kill permit to take out a few individuals, but that will take at least 3 months, by which time the roof will be gone, the rest of the house will have been destroyed by water damage, and the owner will either be homeless or insane, or both. And moving isn’t really an option, because who’s going to buy a house that’s being eaten by vultures?

It’s an even better example of how unexpected conditions can impact your business than the original story was, not least of all because the vultures are impacting the local real estate market and the business opportunities for people who make rubber roofing materials almost as much as they are the homeowner in our story. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the Ridgeway area (or, in fact, anyone else who has read this story on the Internet) ever agreeing to purchase rubber roofing products after this, and anyone who was thinking of moving into the area is now going to be looking for houses with steel shingles (or some other substance that vultures don’t eat) and refusing to consider houses with rubber ones. Which should, in turn, make life difficult for realtors in the area; just as a guess, I don’t think the real estate agent’s license exam in Virginia includes Wildlife Management as one of its subject areas…

Now, I’m not suggesting that you compile a list of every species that could possibly impact your business though its daily behavior, because such a list would take longer than you are likely to have in your lifespan, let alone your strategic planning cycle. I am suggesting that having a contingency plan is a good thing, and that having one that is flexible enough to include what to do if a species you’d previously never even heard of (such as a highly aggressive, carnivorous cousin of the humble turkey vulture) starts to disrupt your business is probably a very good thing. I’m also thinking about investing in those steel roof shingles, as soon as the price comes down far enough that I can afford them – and assuming that nothing out there snacks on those…