The Price of Progress Comes Home to Roost

"That's a pretty low reproductive rate . . . you have to be careful how many you're taking," he said. "We don't have a really good population estimate."

Nonlethal harassment techniques are preferred by both environmentalists and wildlife officials. In Radford, Va., no effort has been spared to roust about 1,400 birds that have settled in the pine trees. Authorities sprayed them with water, exploded fireworks and chopped down some of the trees. A research team from Florida has come to experiment with other scare tactics: shining lasers at the birds and hanging dead vultures in their trees. Often these techniques are only temporarily effective or merely push vultures a short distance away.

"At some point, you've got to say enough is enough," Lowney said.

That point was reached at Dutch Gap, south of Richmond, where vultures had been causing $5,000 to $10,000 in damage to cars and boats every weekend in the spring and summer since 1999, he said. Authorities used a huge walk-in trap, baited with chicken carcasses, that in an hour would cage about 50 vultures.

"We've removed a little over 700 vultures and there are still about 250 there," Lowney said.

Farmers get riled over both their destructiveness and method of attack.

"I've seen them get around a cow, 40 or 50 of them, and they'll get the cow fighting. I've seen them step on calves and puncture their lungs. They'll peck out their eyes and lips and the calf goes in shock and dies," said Chuck Shorter, 55, a livestock farmer from near Radford who estimates that he has lost 80 animals to vultures in more than 30 years of farming. "They're gruesome."

Vultures do have their champions. The prospect of being eaten by one struck poet Robinson Jeffers as an act of transcendence. He wrote, in "Vulture":

"To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes -- What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment, what a life after death."

Robert Sheehy, a biologist at Radford University whose students study the feeding habits of vultures, believes the city of Radford should view the birds as a tourist attraction instead of villains: "I don't think the vultures are doing any harm, and a tremendous amount of energy is being spent on getting rid of them," he said.

In St. Mary's, the bulk of the roost left Breton Bay this month, but another group just emerged in the trees along the wheat fields next to nearby St. Francis Xavier Church.

"I won't go back there," the Rev. John Mattingly said, pointing at the woods. He's keeping his cat Stella inside, too. "It's not out of respect," he said. "It's fear."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.