Trailing Bartram, a bi-monthly Precipitate blog feature, investigates the flora and fauna of Florida.
One of “the attractions” here in Orlando features a ride which involves people in open vehicles pretending they are on an African safari. I’ve boarded the “safari vehicles”—open-sided vehicles made to look like elongated jeeps, decorated in jungle khaki and green, and not long into the ride I noticed a couple of odd things about it. First, and not surprisingly, it’s a much more mediated experience than a real safari. Visitors are guaranteed to see at least some of the animals, since their enclosures are only so big, and there are convenient animal-identification cards at the front of every row of seats in each ride vehicle.
Also accompanying the ride is a storyline. Not everyone pays attention to it; many are more interested in just seeing animals. But the storyline goes something like this: bad, bad men have been spotted shooting elephants for ivory, and your guide and your vehicle, including you, are suddenly re-tasked to track down the poachers. After all, there’s a missing baby elephant involved. What could be more urgent?
Oddly, there’s another missing animal on this ride. I’ve studied the photos and descriptions of the 30-some animals that populate the cards, from impressive elephants and giant giraffes to rare white rhinos. But the creatures I always see the most of don’t exist on any of the cards, and the friendly “guides” never point out their obvious presence, either.
Vultures. One, or three, or ten, or a hundred. You might catch them in your periphery as the jeep takes a sharp turn through the “bush,” but more often than not, you get to watch these gawky birds, up close and personal.
Vultures are surprisingly large. Their waste is visible on the “rocks” that act as disguises for the walls and small canyons between you and the charismatic species that you came to see. And these unexpected visitors eat everything and anything they can get their hands on. Sure they’ll eat dead carcasses, but they’ll also eat tasty fresh food pellets; you might call them opportunivores, adapting to the foods available.
Since they are such flexible opportunivores, no doubt the vulture’s presence has something to do with the “nutrition” (variable-sized pellets of food) placed strategically by the attraction’s staff to ensure that the other animals will be visible and active to guests out for a safari. That nutrition helps the “safari drivers” tell their scripted stories—the ones that don’t have a place for the vultures.
Here in tourist-land the safari ride is just one of many carefully crafted storylines. Each of the park’s other rides has some variation of hero versus monster, and while the monster threatens to disturb the order of things, in the end you and the hero escape just in the nick of time, just as in the safari ride, you save the baby elephant just before exiting your ride vehicle. The monsters (dinosaurs from another era, the yeti, imaginary poachers) bother me less than the erasure of a blatantly visible species from the story.
Maybe the theme parks need to tell a more complete story and one that is more Florida-centered. This story would tell visitors about vultures’ monogamous relationships; the important role they play in Florida’s ecosystem; the fact that black vultures often return to known feeding grounds; how they carry food back to their young, and yes, maybe that they poop on their legs to keep cool—or maybe that part could be saved for the info cards in front of riders.
Leslie Wolcott, Staff Blogger