Watch: Fishing Guide Who Rescued Drowning Vultures in the Gulf Says They Must Have Fallen from the Sky

Capt. Brandon “Bean” Storin and his clients came across a strange sight in the Gulf of Mexico last week. While fishing off the Florida Keys near Islamorada on Jan. 19, they found a pile of around 150 vultures in the water that had apparently fallen out of the sky and into the Gulf. Most of the turkey vultures (around 90 percent of them, according to Storin) were already dead, but Storin and his paying anglers decided they’d try and help the surviving birds.

A similar rescue took place the following day in the Gulf closer to Marathon, where researchers found 60 vultures in the water and saved roughly half of them. The rescued birds were taken to the Marathon Wild Bird Center, according to WFLA News.

“The reason [for the stranding] isn’t clear, but the birds sometimes suffer blunt-force trauma from hitting the water, or simply are cold and waterlogged, without the ability to to lift themselves out of the water,” a spokesperson for the Center told the news outlet. “These events may be caused by a strong down draft pushing them into water.”

Storin agrees with that theory, and he says a shift in the wind followed by a period of dead calm is what caused them to fall into the Gulf. As Storin’s video footage from that day shows, the vultures that he and his clients rescued were eager to get out of the cold water and into his 24-foot center console boat.

“We were all on the same page. Like, let’s help these birds,” Storin tells Outdoor Life. “And as soon as we put the net in the water, they would reach their beaks out and grab on the rim of the net and then pull themselves onto it. Then the rest of the survivors were trying to swim towards the boat.”

The anglers scooped up around a dozen vultures and moved on. It was midday, with no wind and clear skies, and they still had plenty of time to fish. So Storin and his clients spent the afternoon cruising around the Gulf, sight-casting to cobia and tripletail, with a gaggle of wet buzzards onboard. He says the birds spent most of their time sunning themselves while perched on the livewells or some other inconvenient location.

“At the next spot, I see a pack of cobia, so I throw the bait right in front of them and one of the guys hooks up,” Storin says. “But now the guy has to follow the fish around the boat, and he’s trying to jump over these birds to get to the fish. It was hilarious.”

After fishing all afternoon with the vultures, and cleaning the occasional pile of bird crap, Storin dropped them off on a small key on their way back to the dock. He knew there was freshwater there, and that it would be a short flight from the island back to the larger keys. 

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That evening, Storin notified the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission about the vultures he rescued and the 100-plus birds that were left dead in the Gulf, but he hasn’t gotten word from the agency since. Outdoor Life also reached out to FWC for comment or an explanation but has not heard back.

Storin, however, says he has a pretty good idea what happened to the vultures. Although he’s a younger captain, he knows some old salts who’ve seen it multiple times while out on the water. They told him it happens every couple years, especially in the winter, when a shift in the wind blows a bunch of vultures off course and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

“They said what happens is, these birds like to soar over the Overseas Highway and Islamorada during a north wind … They’re not really great flyers, they’re more like gliders, and they’ll get in these thermal pockets and just kind of soar,” Storin says. “What happened here was the wind rapidly switched, and went from north to east to southeast.”

Storin explains that if you look at a map, you can see how a wind coming from the southeast would push the vultures northwest, carrying them out over the Gulf of Mexico. He keeps close tabs on the weather at all times, and says he noticed this shift in the wind direction on Jan. 18, the day before they found the vultures. It was blowing pretty good, he says, around 15 to 20 knots.   

“I remember thinking to myself, The wind’s all over the place, and it was like the perfect recipe for disaster for these birds. Because after that shift, the wind just cut out completely,” Storin says of the early-morning conditions on Jan. 19. “And once the wind cut out, they couldn’t make it back to land in time. They were probably already tired from trying to fly back to land, and they were still four or five miles from the closest island when we found them.”

Mass die-off events with birds falling from the sky are rare, but they’re “not totally unusual,” according to some avian ecologists. These can be caused by a number of factors, including diseases, storms, and other weather conditions.