Rutter Farms

There is an animal that eats anthrax, botulism, cholera, and rabies for lunch and walks away fine. It doesn't have a good PR team, so most people have no idea what it's actually doing for us. The turkey vulture's stomach acid runs at a pH of around 1, roughly as corrosive as battery acid, and hot enough to dissolve bones, hide, and virtually any pathogen that comes with the carcass. A vulture eating a diseased animal isn't spreading the disease, but putting an ending to it. The infection chain terminates in the vulture's gut and goes nowhere else. Few other scavengers on Earth does this reliably. Without vultures, things get bad for humans in a hurry. We've learned this hard lesson first hand. In the 1990s, Indian farmers started giving their cattle a cheap painkiller called diclofenac. When vultures ate the carcasses, the drug destroyed their kidneys. The population collapsed by more than 95 percent in under a decade, one of the fastest declines of any bird species ever recorded. The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs and rats moved in to do the cleanup instead. Both species actually carry and spread rabies. Both brought the disease into contact with human populations in ways vultures never would have. A 2024 study in the American Economic Review estimated the vulture collapse contributed to roughly 500,000 additional human deaths over the following decade. Not metaphorically. Counted deaths, linked statistically to the collapse of one bird. The same thing is now beginning in sub-Saharan Africa, where poachers bait carcasses with poison to kill lions and elephants that might alert rangers. Vultures find the carcass first, as they always do. Six of Africa's eleven vulture species are now threatened with extinction. The animal that shows up to the things nobody else will touch is doing more disease control than most of what we actively protect. It just has the misfortune of looking exactly like what it is.

A single toad in your yard can eat thousands of pest insects over a single summer. One cheap June project gives them a place to hide out over winter. Find a terracotta pot, ideally 12-14 in diameter, remove the drainage plug, and bury it on its side in a shady corner of the yard, flush with the ground. Pack the inside loosely with leaf litter and leave a clear entrance. You've built a toad hibernaculum. Toads need a frost-free place to overwinter underground, and a buried pot gives them exactly that. They find these within a season if toads are anywhere in your neighborhood.