While there are a lot of stories about vultures, not many feature the Egyptian vulture, which is one of the smaller varieties of the bird. The ancient Egyptians considered it to be a sacred animal. However, it’s larger cousin, the griffon vulture, is the one must commonly depicted in ancient Egyptian art and it is the griffon vulture who is associated with the Egyptian goddess of childbirth Nekhbet.
Egyptian Vultures are thought to be the oldest existing variety of vulture, so perhaps it could be argued that the Turkish story of Solomon and the Vulture, in which Solomon sets out to consult the creature that has lived the longest, is about the Egyptian vulture and not about one of it’s larger cousins.
However, my pick for these zoo residents is the West African story of Yonkon-pass-me-dollar-loss which can be found on page 319 of Carrion Dreams 2.0: A Chronicle of the Human-Vulture Relationships by Benjamin Joel Wilkinson. I’ve altered it in telling to emphasise their yellow faces.
Carrion Dreams 2.0 is available under a generous Creative Commons license from the Archive.org
Solomon and the Vulture can be found in the book Outfoxing Fear edited by Kathleen Ragan and published in 2006 by W,W. Norton.
Restorying the Earth 