This Halloween chicken came to Monteen as a fuzzy baby and he's been raised all summer. She had warned me that he's extremely shy and flies off when visitors come over.

Well when I arrived, he was on the roof and I slowly inched the car around the center to the back where Monteen was.

He flew down over our heads and hopped right up. I could pet him like a puppy to her surprise.

I wasn't nervous or afraid of him and he can smell it.

He's the sweetest little thing that's big as a turkey.

There's a pair of wild Black Vultures that hang out that are trying to adopt him. We think they lost their baby and are trying to surrogate him. They are completely wild and come right up to us t try and coax him to them.

Monteen called and told me the baby left with his new surrogate parents yesterday evening.

That's cool. They seem to be very social birds.

Very cool! I had a couple of baby turkey vultures in town a couple of years back that were living in a nest in the porch of a derelict house. Somebody bought the place and started making improvements, and in the process they got "evicted". The adults left for good, but the young ones couldn't fly yet and somebody called in a couple of "chickens" running around the neighborhood that had taken up roost on another neighbor's patio furniture who was out of town on vacation.

I got there and immediately determined that clearly they weren't chickens. We managed to track down a rehabilitator a couple of hours away and she came out and got them that night. I'd never seen juvenile vultures like that before...very cool little guys and really not as skittish as one might expect.