The birds

Invaders from the sky An eviction notice delivered a month before keeps them on edge, fearing that the next knock on the door will be someone ordering them to leave. They have no place to go. Outside, Daniel Cullen shows a reporter the 30-foot camper he had hoped would take the family to a new life somewhere across country.

The plan vanished when the pickup truck to pull the camper was repossessed earlier that morning. As he discusses the family s latest setback, a neighbor walks up with a foil-wrapped dish of Swedish meatballs and hands it to Dan. He smiles, his eyes glisten.

Marion Borg shrugs, saying it is no big deal. While they chat, some vultures approach the property from the east. Isn t that awful?

Borg says as she prepares to leave. They are not beautiful anymore. Watching the birds take their place on the limbs of his trees, Dan goes quiet.

Engine noise from an approaching truck suddenly breaks the silence, startling the massive birds from their quiet rest. As if on cue, dozens of turkey vultures and black vultures emerge from the trees, filling the sky like a black cloud announcing an imminent storm. The birds circle silently, seemingly trying to find the source of the commotion.

As the truck disappears, their attention shifts toward the grim-faced man below. A child walking her bike passes the house. Wide-eyed at the sight of the birds, she stumbles.

As suddenly as they had emerged, the massive birds disappear into the darkness, sheltered from view by the trees foliage. Isn t it ironic, Dan Cullen says, his eyes fixed on the birds, that we must leave but the vultures can stay. DAN AND SUE CULLEN, stone masons by trade, bought the house at 145 Main St.

in Hopkinton in March 2002. After years of renting, the high school sweethearts were excited when they found the small house in Ashaway, a quaint village near the Westerly town line. Sue had grown up just one street over.

With financial backing from Dan s mother, Carla, they purchased the house for $152,500. They knew the house needed some work. What they didn t know is that they weren t the only ones with a claim on the property.

Like many new homeowners, Dan and Sue set about cleaning up the yard and cutting the overgrown vegetation. Dan concentrated on scraping away a whitish, hard coating on the tree trunks and splattered on the ground. He thought it was resin, frozen through the winter.

One day, when another wave of nausea sent him to the bathroom to vomit, it clicked. Whatever was wrong had to be coming from the mysterious white substance. It turned out, we are going out, working and getting sick, Dan, 32, says.

The resin, he would later learn, was calcified vulture excrement. WHEN THE CULLENS moved in, the birds were off nesting, most likely somewhere in the south. The family didn t think much of it when a single vulture, or even an occasional group, showed up in the heat of that first summer.

By Halloween, however, masses of turkey vultures and black vultures were roosting on the property. They left sometime in the spring. The largely vulture-free summer that followed led them to hope the birds presence had been a one-time phenomenon.

Then fall came and so did the vultures. This time they arrived earlier and in larger numbers. Dan remembers his first attempt to get help.

Looking through government listings in the phone book, he found a number for wildlife problems under the state Department of Environmental Management. He says the man who answered his phone call questioned why he was calling the DEM. Puzzled and a bit irritated, Dan responded: Isn t this number for wildlife problems?

I have a wildlife problem. The man told him something he would hear over and over again in the years ahead: vultures are protected by the federal government from destruction or even harassment under the l918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Harm them and you ll face up to $15,000 in fines or six months in jail.

DEM referred Dan to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.

S. Fish and Wildlife Service where officials repeated the warning and recommended he try to disperse the birds using non-lethal methods. DAN CULLEN TRIED the obvious: cutting down trees and trimming limbs to reduce the options for roosting.

He says he couldn t find an arborist to take the job so he tried to do it himself. He got sick. Then my neighbor [Ben York] came over, and he got sick.

Bouts of nausea and diarrhea convinced them to stop. The Cullens resorted to banging pots and pans, blowing air horns, flying kites, floating large helium-filled Mylar balloons and shooting firecrackers. They bought scent spray, only to later learn black vultures don t have a good sense of smell.

It didn t bother the turkey vultures either, though they do have a heightened sense of smell. They even got an Australian shepherd because they were told a dog s bark would scare the birds. The barking worsened their already thorny relationship with new next-door neighbors; the dog got a skin infection, and the birds stayed put.

Vultures by the hundreds kept roosting on their property. The Cullens gave the dog away. VULTURE POPULATIONS have been growing over the years, particularly in the Southeast, although they are progressively expanding their territory north.

As their numbers have increased, so has the length of their unwanted stay. Turkey vultures became a common sight in New England in the 1950s and black vultures became relatively common in the mid-90s, says Shaibal Mitra, a field ornithologist who grew up in South County and now works for the City University of New York s College of Staten Island. With an average weight of 4 pounds and a wingspan of up to 6 feet, turkey vultures the most numerous in Ashaway are the larger of the two species.

They are predominantly dark brown or black with a featherless, bright red (adult) or brown (juvenile) head and a relatively long, narrow tail. Black vultures, which have a shorter, wider tail, weigh less than 4 pounds and have a wingspan of less than 5 feet. It takes a federal depredation permit, co-signed by state wildlife authorities, to trap, kill or relocate the animals.

Vultures can be dispersed without a permit with the caveat that you are not disturbing them during nesting, says Monte D. Chandler, regional wildlife services director of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Vultures feed mostly on carrion, although black vultures sometimes prey on domestic fowl and livestock.

They have been welcomed in some areas and introduced in others for their road-kill cleanup services. Contrary to what people think, vultures are not always just scavengers, Chandler points out. They do prey.

Dan and Sue Cullen say the vultures that roost on their property prefer live kill. They took a squirrel right out of our tree, confirms Ben York, who lives across the street. Dan bends down to pick up their seven-year-old white cat Hsiu Chien, named after a Bruce Lee movie character, and points at scars on his head.

The wound was caused by the talons of a vulture that tried to stomp on the cat, he says. On a previous occasion, he says, a vulture grabbed Hsiu Chien and tried to lift him. New World vultures have strong bills for pulling and tearing, but their feet are usually too weak to lift or carry food.

They typically step on their food to hold it in place and then peck at it. MITRA SAYS he first learned of the roost at the Cullen s home in the winter of 1999-2000, two years before the family bought the house, and has seen both vulture species at the site during the Audubon Society s annual bird counts since 2002. He says there are at least two other vulture roosts in Hopkinton near Route 3, but the roost on the Cullens property is the only one near a home; the others are in more isolated areas.

Birdwatchers from as far away as Ohio and Maryland come to the neighborhood to observe the vultures. Most watch from across the street or park by the nearby First Hopkinton Seventh Day Baptist Church. Some, Dan says, have walked right onto the Cullen property.

Nobody knows why the birds first picked the Cullens trees as their winter roost, but once a good site is found, vultures return year after year. It s known in the field as site tenacity. The Cullens bought the property from the children of the late Catherine M.

Cawley, who had attempted for years to disperse the vultures with air horns and other noise devices. Approximately at 6:30 at night, she would go out there with pots and pans, says Councilman Thomas E. Buck, who lives around the corner.

You could almost set your clock by it. Buck remembers seeing the birds around for at least 15 to 20 years. He says he never thought much about them until the Cullens case started gaining attention.

It s like somebody living next to a train track, Buck says. After a while, you don t feel the train anymore. EFFORTS TO DISPERSE the vultures stretched the Cullens household budget from the outset.

They were spending money on fighting the vulture incursion while paying for home improvement projects and financing the startup of their masonry and chimney-cleaning business. New setbacks, like discovering a problem with their well, added to their financial burdens. I d come down and I d feel fine.

I d have a glass of water and a little while later, I don t feel good [anymore] and I m in the bathroom and I m throwing up, Dan recalls. The family stopped using their well water for drinking or cooking during the summer of 2003 and started buying bottled water or using water from a neighbor. They had their well tested.

To their surprise, the test came back clean. It turns out they had tested the wrong well one that had been taken out of service because of its proximity to a septic system. Technicians from the company showed them where their drinking well was located under the vulture roost.

As expected, tests showed the water was contaminated with bird droppings and presented a coliform and salmonella threat. FEARING FOR their health, the Cullens intensified their efforts to rid their property of the vultures. Years of exposure to the birds excrement had already contaminated their soil and the well.

They were convinced that the vultures were responsible for their son Craig s asthma, Dan s Lyme disease, and the frequent nausea and diarrhea everyone suffered. Attempts to disturb the birds backfired. Their neighbors got upset and the vultures retaliated.

In November 2004, while Dan was out shooting at the trees, neighbor Douglas Paquette called the police complaining that his wife had seen Dan shooting a firearm, possibly a pellet gun. Quaratella went to the Cullens home and found that Dan had been using a paintball gun. Concluding that no law had been violated, he left.

A month later, the neighbors called DEM and the police when they heard shouting coming from the Cullen property. Dan, who had been out using the paintball gun, says a birdwatcher participating in the annual count attacked him with sticks and tried to take the gun. The officers tried to quiet things down.

Lt. Longtin of DEM told Cullen to avoid confrontation by refraining from shooting at the birds when people are watching and Officer Quaratella told Cullen to post no trespassing signs and to use his judgment when to scatter the birds. Dan says the incident left him frustrated because nobody seemed to care about his family s plight.

At one point, he threatened to level the property of all its trees. But, he says, Longtin told him that he couldn t do that because it amounted to habitat alteration. A spokesperson denies that anyone at DEM told Dan he couldn t remove trees on his property; Longtin s report of the birdwatcher episode makes no mention of it.

Dan stashed the paintball gun and tried other ways to make the vultures leave. He bought a critter blaster, which produces supersonic sounds, to annoy the birds. At most, the vultures would leave the roost, circle the property and return.

He bought a propane cannon, which discharges regulated sonic blasts to frighten and disorient birds. He mounted a motion-activated scarecrow on the roof to blast water at the birds. The water formed puddles by the sidewalk in front of the house.

The activity didn t scare the birds away, it made them vomit partially digested food on the ground beneath.. INCREASINGLY FED UP, Dan bombarded state and federal wildlife officials with more pleas for help and called everyone else he could think of, including the governor s office and land conservancy organizations.

He also left messages and visited the Hopkinton Town Hall, where his problem got lost in a shuffle of town managers Hopkinton has gone through at least five town managers since the Cullens bought their house. In January 2005, USDA staff members finally agreed to help the Cullens obtain a depredation permit. The permit, issued just a month later, gave him license to take up to 20 turkey vultures with an air rifle.

He bought a high-powered air rifle capable of shooting pointed field pellets at 1,000 feet per second and started shooting at the birds right away. Records say he killed 11 vultures during the year covered by the permit. He hung two of the birds carcasses from the trees.

According to experts, the presence of a dead bird often deters other birds from roosting. He burned the other carcasses in an open pit in the backyard. Sometime in 2006, Dan says Police Chief John S.

Scuncio told him to stop using the air rifle because discharging a weapon near a dwelling is illegal. Repeated attempts to talk with Scuncio about that encounter and the vulture problem in town have been ignored. Dan put the rifle aside and returned to using the paintball gun.

THE FAMILY S FINANCES spiraled out of control last winter. The years of fighting the vultures, by their own account, had cost them plenty: $500 on veterinary bills; $4,000 on devices to scare the vultures away, $2,500 on tree removal and thinning of the roost, and more than $100 a year on phone calls to government officials. The Cullens fell behind in their mortgage payments.

Making matters worse, their business, Chimney Swift, had no money coming in. GMH Military Housing, a company based in Newtown Square, Pa., which has a contract with the U.

S. Navy, hired Dan and Sue to inspect, clean and rebuild chimneys on military housing in Newport. They say they did the work but, due to administrative delays, didn t get paid from November 2005, to late February 2006.

When you pay out everything, and they don t pay you for four months, it starts to take a toll, Dan says. .it was either paying your mortgage or paying your health insurance, he says.

And food, adds Sue, his 31-year-old wife. They had hoped being a vendor for a Navy contractor would help grow their new business. Looking back, Dan, with a hint of regret, wonders whether they would have been better off sticking to residential customers.

But, even some of those customers didn t pay. He says the business is owed about $3,800 that he doesn t expect to recoup. By then, however, there [was] just no way to get from under it, Dan says.

They tried but couldn t. Unable to pay soaring construction liability insurance costs, their company went first. They sold most of the equipment and tools, but it wasn t enough.