Charles Barnes, age 15, of Phoenix, Ariz 

Is the turkey buzzard the turkey vulture?

The lordly eagle is classified as a falconiforme bird, a name which points up the features he has in common with the falcon  This outstanding order of birds also includes the hawks and the owls, the kites and the kestrels, the big condors and the vultures: These aces of the air differ from the fluttering songbirds as greatly as the lion differs from the lamb 

All the falconiformes are meat‑eaters for which they are fitted with bills like scimitars  Some have talons for patching live meat, others do not  All are masters of flight  Some wheel aloft without effort on soaring pinions  Some swoop silently through the night  The large falconiforme order is subdivided into families according to features  The eagle and the hawk families are birds of prey which devour fresh meat 

The vulture family is named Cathartidae ‑ a word which means, of all things, the cleansers  They are the cleaner‑uppers of the woods and the fields, the high elopes and the prairies  Their thankless task is to devour the dead bodies of mice and the corpses of larger animals that litter the landscape  We pall them scavengers and carrion‑eaters and we often forget the valuable garbage collecting they do  They must eat what they find on the ground, for they lack the talons necessary for catching and clawing live prey 

Various vulture squads patrol the plains of Africa, Asia and parts of Europe  The native vultures of North America include the big, gaudy condor and the smaller black vulture  But our moat common flying garbage man is the turkey vulture, alias the turkey buzzard  The word buzzard is twisted from bustard, the name of a big bird of the stork clan, and our turkey buzzard has a turkey‑red head

Regardless of names, he is not related to the true buzzard or to the Thanksgiving turkey 

In the past, turkey‑buzzard‑vulture rarely strayed north of the Mason‑Dixon line  But the world climates grows warmer and, along with other animals, he is extending his range, In the past 15 years, his clean‑up squads have been seen patrolling the fields and green hills of Massachusetts 

Seen close‑up, the turkey buzzard is far from attractive and his carrion diet gives him a foul odor  He has a scrawny bare neck and head and his coarse, black feathers have an oily gleam  He is less than a yard long and weighs less than three pounds  But his slender wings spread three feet wide 

In flight he is magnificent to see, He soars and wheels with the fingery feathers of his wings tipped upwards, He senses from afar the corpse of the smallest mouse and swoops down to do his duty  If the corpse is large, other members of the garbage squad wheel in from afar to help clean up the carrion.