Lauren J.

There's a kettle over your house right now, but I can guarantee there's no tea in it. When a large group of vultures spirals together in a rising column of air, it's called a kettle, and September into October is when you're most likely to see one. Sometimes a few dozen birds, all the way up to 100+. They aren't circling something dead. They're climbing. Turkey vultures are heavy birds with six-foot wingspans and they're terrible at powered flight. Flapping burns enormous energy, so instead they find a thermal, a column of warm air rising off a sun-heated field or ridge, and ride it up in circles without moving their wings. When they get to the top they peel off and glide, losing altitude slowly across miles of country until they find the next thermal and do it again. That's how they migrate. Climb, glide, repeat. They can cover hundreds of miles with minimal physical work. Which is also why they don't get going until mid-morning. Thermals need the ground to heat up first. You'll see vultures sitting in trees with their wings spread at sunrise, waiting for the air to start warming. The ones passing over now are heading to the Gulf Coast, Texas, Mexico, some all the way to South America. Certain spots in Central America funnel millions of migrating raptors into a river of birds that takes days to pass. If you want to catch it: watch ridgelines and river valleys on a clear day with a light wind, late morning through afternoon.

That scruffy-looking, half-grown raccoon wandering through your yard in broad daylight is in the most dangerous stretch of its entire life. It isn't sick and it isn't orphaned. It just left home for the first time. September and October are dispersal season for a lot of young wildlife. The raccoons, foxes, opossums, skunks, and coyotes born this spring are leaving the territories where they were raised and trying to find somewhere of their own. For the first time, they're doing all of it alone: crossing roads they've never crossed, moving through ground that already belongs to an adult, finding food with nobody showing them where it is, and locating shelter before winter. That's why young animals turn up in places that look wrong. A raccoon crosses your lawn at noon. A young fox sits awkwardly next to a shed. An opossum looks thin and scruffy and unsure what to do next. Daylight doesn't mean rabies. What actually warrants a call is neurological: stumbling, circling, paralysis, repeated falling, seizures, or an animal that barely reacts when you approach. That's worth a wildlife rehabilitator or animal control. Young, alone and confused is not. And don't trap one and drive it somewhere nicer. You aren't releasing it into an empty forest. You're dropping it into another animal's territory with no den it knows, no food it can find, and no idea where it is. The best thing you can do to keep what's yours yours is make your house a terrible place to move into. Cap the chimney, screen the vents, close the crawlspace, block the gaps under the shed and the deck, and secure the garbage. If you keep chickens, check the coop tonight. Hardware cloth instead of chicken wire, buried at the perimeter, birds locked in after dark. Give the young upstarts passing through your yard a chance to keep going.