Black vultures attack and kill cattle. Climate change is one reason they're spreading north

EMINENCE, Ky. (AP) — Allan Bryant scans the sky as he watches over a minutes-old calf huddled under a tree line with its mother. After a few failed tries, the calf stands on wobbly legs for the first time, looking to nurse.

Above, a pair of birds circle in the distance. Bryant, hoping they're not black vultures, is relieved to see they're only turkey vultures — red-headed and not aggressive.

“Honestly, the black vulture is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They’re easy to hate.”

Black vultures, scavengers that sometimes attack and kill sick or newborn animals, didn't used to be a problem here. But now Bryant frequently sees the birds following a birth. He hasn't lost a calf in several years, but they've killed his animals before. So now he takes measures to stop them.

In some of his fields, he erects a scarecrow of sorts — a dead black vulture — aimed at scaring off the birds. It's a requirement of his depredation permit through the Kentucky Farm Bureau, which allows him to shoot a few birds a year. The dead bird keeps the live birds away for about a week, but they eventually come back, he said.

It’s a problem that may grow worse for cattle farmers as the scavenging birds’ range expands northward, in part due to climate change. Lobbying groups have been pushing for legislation that would allow landowners to kill more of these birds, which are protected but not endangered. But experts say more research is needed to better understand how the birds impact livestock and how their removal could affect ecosystems.

Black vultures used to mainly live in the southeastern U.S. and farther south in Latin and South America, but over the past century they've started to rapidly stretch northward and also west into the desert Southwest, said Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration.

Warmer winters on average, fueled by climate change, are making it easier for the birds to stay in places that used to be too cold for them. What's more, the human footprint in suburban and rural areas is enriching their habitat: development means cars, and cars mean roadkill. Cattle farms can also offer a buffet of vulnerable animals for vultures that learn the seasonal calving schedule.

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from a lot of different studies of birds, it’s that they are very good at taking advantage of food resources and remembering where those things are,” Farnsworth said.

Although black vultures are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, they aren't really a migratory species, he said. Instead, they breed, and some disperse to new areas and settle there.

After losing a calf to a black vulture a decade ago, Tom Karr, who raises cattle near Pomeroy, Ohio, tried to move his fall calving season later in the year in hopes the vultures would be gone by then. But that didn't help — the birds stay all year, he said.

Until newborn calves are a few days old, “we try to keep them up closer to the barns,” said Joanie Grimes, the owner of a 350-head calf-cow operation in Hillsboro, Ohio. She said they've been dealing with the birds for 15 years, but keeping them out of remote fields has helped improve matters.

Annette Ericksen has noticed the black vultures for several years on her property, Twin Maples Farm in Milton, West Virginia, but they haven't yet lost any animals to them. When they expect calves and lambs, they move the livestock into a barn, and they also use dogs — Great Pyrenees — trained to patrol the fields and the barnyard for raptors that might hurt the animals.

The size of their operation makes it easier to account for every animal, but “any loss would be severely detrimental to our small business,” she wrote in an email.

Local cattlemen's associations and state farm bureaus often work together to help producers get depredation permits, which allow them to shoot a few birds each year, as long as they keep track of it on paper.

“The difficulty with that is, if the birds show up, by the time you can get your permit, get all that taken care of, the damage is done,” said Brian Shuter, executive vice president of the Indiana Beef Cattle Association. Farmers said calves can be worth hundreds of dollars or upward of $1,000 or $2,000, depending on the breed.

In March, lawmakers in Congress introduced a bill that would let farmers capture or kill any black vulture “in order to prevent death, injury, or destruction to livestock.” Many farmers and others in the cattle industry have supported the move, and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in July commended the House Natural Resources Committee for advancing the bill.

Farnsworth, of the Cornell lab, said it's not necessarily a good thing to make it easier to kill black vultures, which he said fill “a super important role" in cleaning up “dead stuff.”

Simply killing the birds, Farnsworth said, may make room for more bothersome predators or scavengers. He said though black vultures can leave behind gory damage, current research doesn't show that they account for an outsize proportion of livestock deaths.

But many farmers are unwilling to do nothing.

“They just basically eat them alive,” Karr said. “It is so disgusting.”

Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social. Follow Joshua A. Bickel on Instagram, Bluesky and X @joshuabickel.

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Black vultures and turkey vultures circle in the sky Friday, Sept. 26, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

A black vulture stands over a carcass Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Ballardsville, Ky. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

A pair of black vultures roost next to a turkey vulture, left, Monday, Sept. 29, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

Young calves stand in a field Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Eminence, Ky. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

A makeshift cross for a black vulture effigy stands near a field Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Eminence, Ky. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

A cow stands next to her newborn calf Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Eminence, Ky. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

Allan Bryant moves his cattle to a field Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Eminence, Ky. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

A black vulture, top right, flies Monday, Sept. 29, 2025, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market is drifting lower on Tuesday following mixed data on the economy’s strength, which did little to clear uncertainty about where interest rates may be heading.

The S&P 500 fell 0.4% in afternoon trading and remains a bit below its all-time high set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 348 points, or 0.7%, as of 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was nearly unchanged.

Treasury yields also slipped in the bond market after one report said the U.S. unemployment rate was at its worst level since 2021, but employers also added more jobs last month than economists expected. A separate report, meanwhile, said an underlying measure of strength for revenue at U.S. retailers grew more in October than economists expected.

The mixed data kept alive hopes that the Federal Reserve could continue to cut interest rates further in 2026. What the Fed does with interest rates is a top driver for Wall Street because lower rates can give a boost to the economy and to prices for investments, even if they also may worsen inflation.

A report coming on Thursday will show how bad inflation was last month, and economists expect it to show prices for U.S. consumers continue to rise faster than anyone would like.

A report released on Tuesday after U.S. stocks began trading suggested price pressures are rising sharply, with average selling prices for businesses climbing at one of the fastest rates since the middle of 2022. The preliminary data from S&P Global also said growth for overall business activity slowed to its weakest level since June.

“Higher prices are again being widely blamed on tariffs, with an initial impact on manufacturing now increasingly spilling over to services to broaden the affordability problem,” according to Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

On Wall Street, the sharpest losses came from companies in the oil business as prices for crude kept sliding.

Expectations that companies are pumping more than enough oil to meet the world's demand has sent the price for a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude to its lowest level since 2021. It fell 2.7% Monday, as did Brent crude, the international standard. U.S. crude settled at $55.27 a barrel, while Brent settled at $58.92.

That drove APA's stock down 5.7%. Marathone Petroleum sank 5.1% and Halliburton dropped 4.2% for some of Wall Street's larger losses.

Artificial-intelligence technology stocks, meanwhile, were mixed after dominating the market in recent days.

Oracle rose 1.8%, and Broadcom added 0.3%. They both had dropped to sharp losses last week, even though both reported stronger profits for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

But CoreWeave, which rents out access to top-of-the-line AI chips, fell 5.7%.

Questions remain about whether all the spending underway on AI technology will produce the kind of profits and productivity that will make it worth the expense.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, Pfizer fell 4.6% after giving a forecast for profit in 2026 that was below what some analysts expected. Its forecast for revenue next year, of between $59.5 billion and $62.5 billion, was close to analysts’ expectations.

Kraft Heinz fell 0.8% after saying Steve Cahillane, who was most recently CEO of Kellanova, will join as CEO on Jan. 1. After Kraft Heinz splits into two companies, which is expected to happen in the second half of 2026, Cahillane will lead the one that will hold onto the Heinz, Philadelphia and Kraft Mac & Cheese brands.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.6% ahead of an expected hike to interest rates by the Bank of Japan later this week.

Other markets in Asia also had some of the world's sharper swings. South Korea’s Kospi dropped 2.2%, while indexes fell 1.5% in Hong Kong and 1.1% in Shanghai.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.14% from 4.18% late Monday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, eased to 3.47% from 3.51%.

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

Specialists Alex Weitzman, left, and Meric Greenbaum work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

A television displays a news conference with Fed chairman Jerome Powell on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Currency traders pass by a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), top center left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, top center, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters, in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)