Neighbors Cry Fowl When Woman Feeds 100 Vultures Raw Meat: Weird News & Oddities

A Maryland woman is representing herself in her fight against a court order requiring her to stop feeding raw meat to vultures in the back yard of her Columbia home.

Her neighbors, meanwhile, would very much like the buffet to permanently close, for health as well as aesthetic reasons.

They say flocks of as many as 100 vultures have taken to perching on the woman’s deck railing and roof and roaming her back yard. Then there’s the putrid smell of decaying meat, disease-carrying vulture feces running off rooftops, and regurgitated chicken bones turning up in nearby yards.

The birds have gotten comfortable.

Given a steady supply of food, the vultures have little reason to range far in search of carrion. That’s normally their job, and an important one. Vultures are nature’s cleanup crew, soaring on air currents until they spot a dead animal below and making remarkably quick work of it.

The woman told The Banner she began feeding the birds several years ago after seeing a committee of vultures shivering in her back yard on a cold winter day. She thought she was doing right by the birds, which she views as guardians

She started with about 40 cans of cat food a day but switched to raw chicken — in the winter, more than 200 pounds every day.

• Read more: Maryland Woman Ordered To Stop Feeding Large Flocks Of Vultures

Bruce’s Final Appeal

A dog at the center of a closely watched legal fight was euthanized Wednesday by animal authorities in Ventura County, California, before the U.S. Supreme Court could weigh a last-minute request to keep him alive.

Bruce, a 3-year-old, 100-pound Great Pyrenees, had been legally deemed “vicious” after several biting incidents, including attacks that seriously injured a child and two adults.

A judge ordered Bruce euthanized in April. A federal court briefly put that order on hold, but the stay was lifted earlier this month.

Attorneys for Bruce’s former owner and the Santa Paula Animal Rescue Center made one final appeal to Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, arguing Bruce should remain in county custody while a federal appeal played out.

The rescue group said dog behaviorist Cesar Millan, known as “the dog whisperer,” had agreed to take Bruce and that it was willing to add Ventura County to a liability insurance policy worth up to $30 million.

The request for Supreme Court intervention came too late to change Bruce’s fate.

• Read more: Bruce, A Great Pyrenees, Euthanized Despite Last-Minute Supreme Court Appeal

‘Jaws’ Fears Renewed

A Jersey Shore mayor is worried that modern shark fishing is creating a little too much “Jaws” energy off Bay Head.

Mayor Bill Curtis said anglers using drones and kayaks to carry bait hundreds of yards offshore could be drawing sharks closer to swimmers. He called the practice “chumming,” though traditional chumming involves scattering chopped fish in the water, not simply dropping a baited hook.

Shark fishing from the beach is legal in New Jersey, as is using drones to place bait. Local tackle shop owner Scott Thomas said the sport has grown quickly as shark numbers have increased, with anglers sometimes catching three to seven sharks in a night.

Despite the worries, there have been no shark attacks at the Jersey Shore in 2026. New Jersey has recorded just 15 attacks dating to the 1800s. The toll includes the infamous 1916 attacks often linked to the inspiration for “Jaws,” which fueled an intense and often misplaced fear of sharks and the open water.

• Read more: Mayor Says Shark Fishing Prompts ‘Jaws’ Worries Along Jersey Shore

Cats On Duty

New York’s bodega cats have job descriptions that are, at best, loosely enforced.

Take Jimmy, a portly orange tabby who lives at a Second Avenue bodega — the city’s shorthand for a small neighborhood convenience store — on the Upper East Side.

He was brought in to discourage rats and mice but apparently discovered customer relations was more his thing. His owners say Jimmy’s habit of hanging around the doorway draws people inside and brings in about $400 a day in extra business.

Jimmy is among several Upper East Side felines featured in the forthcoming book “Bodega Cats of New York,” by Dan Rimada with photos by Gulce Kilkis. The pair have visited hundreds of bodegas since Rimada began documenting their resident cats in 2022.

There’s Cookie, a tuxedo cat credited with boosting foot traffic; Mia, a Scottish Fold mix whose smooshed face has earned her a neighborhood following and her own Instagram account; and Manny, a gray tabby with perhaps the most useful workplace skill of all: He reportedly disappears whenever health inspectors — or anyone carrying a clipboard and lanyard — show up.

That last trick matters because bodega cats technically aren’t allowed under New York City health rules. Efforts are underway at the city and state levels to legalize them while setting standards for their care.

Rimada says the cats have become something bigger than mousers, drawing fierce loyalty from customers and serving as familiar neighborhood fixtures in a city where familiar things have a way of disappearing. The book is expected out in November.

• Read more: The Secret Lives Of Bodega Cats On The Upper East Side

A Rare Gorilla Arrival

This isn’t weird in the usual sense. But it is unusual in the sense that a gorilla isn’t born every day in the United States.

The Detroit Zoo said this week that voters in a naming contest chose Usala for the infant born July 12. Her name means “forest” in the Kikumu language and is also the name of a conservation corridor connecting crucial gorilla habitats in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That makes Usala a pretty rare arrival. An average of just 10 to 15 gorillas are born each year at accredited zoos in the United States and North America under Species Survival Plan breeding programs for threatened or endangered species. Usala, first-time mother Tulivu and father Mshindi are Western lowland gorillas, which are critically endangered.

And Detroit doesn’t exactly have a crowded gorilla nursery. Usala is only the second gorilla born in the zoo’s 98-year history. Mshindi also fathered the first, Motema, born two years ago.

• Read more: Detroit Zoo’s Newest Baby Gorilla Has A Name

Feds Kick Back

When a person kicks a sea lion, it may not fight back. Federal wildlife officials are another matter.

A La Jolla, California, man pleaded guilty this week to violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act after a viral video showed him repeatedly and forcefully kicking a sea lion at La Jolla Cove.

Tyler Muehl, 18, admitted kicking the sea lion at least four times on the evening of July 22 as it sat on a sea wall near Ellen Browning Scripps Park. He kicked the animal twice in the face, causing it to recoil.

When the sea lion tried to get away, prosecutors said, Muehl chased it and kicked at it twice more before it escaped over the wall and made it to the beach.

“Federal crime. Federal consequences,” U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon said in a statement.

Muehl is scheduled to be sentenced in October.

• Read more: Feds Kick Back After California Man Picks On The Wrong Sea Lion

Pokémon Fans Flip The Switch

A Maryland Pokémon card show tried something unusual in a hobby plagued by scalpers: It banned vendors from selling sealed cards that are still available at retail stores.

That sounds like a curious business strategy for a card show. It worked. About 7,000 people turned up at Marley Station Mall in Glen Burnie for the June event, organizers told Patch, blowing past the mall’s previous event record of about 3,500. The rule was intended to keep scalpers from buying up cards at Walmart or Target and reselling them to kids and parents at multiples of the retail price.

The weekend got stranger and considerably sweeter from there. Attendees donated more than 5,700 pounds of food in exchange for “Poké Bucks” and raffle tickets, while organizers handed out roughly 4,000 Pokémon-inspired cards featuring adoptable shelter animals — including dogs, cats, birds and gerbils. At least two prospective adopters later showed up at the shelter with PokéPet cards in hand.

• Read more: Pokémon Show Draws Thousands After Scalper Crackdown

Funeral Home Mystery

Authorities say it could take several days to determine the identity of dozens of bodies found improperly stored at a Chicago funeral home.

The bodies of more than 50 people in various stages of decomposition were found stacked at the South Chicago Chapel, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Medical examiners and forensic pathologists were notified by Illinois and Chicago officials about improperly stored decedents at the chapel. Authorities did not immediately release information about how long the remains had been at the funeral home, who operated the business, or what led authorities to discover the conditions.

• Read more: More Than 50 Improperly Stored Bodies Found AT Funeral Home

Closing Thoughts …

The Phillies and Twins took the field Thursday night in an Iowa cornfield made famous by “Field of Dreams,” a spectacle built on baseball nostalgia. But Patch’s Justin Heinze found something stranger and deeper beneath the Netflix production and Major League Baseball fanfare: the almost religious hold the game still has on people.

W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” the novel behind the movie, imagined disgraced members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox emerging from the corn not in search of fame or money, but something closer to redemption. Heinze writes that Kinsella deliberately separated baseball from baseball the business, placing its ghosts not in a packed stadium but on a quiet field where “only the land is truly witness.”

That makes Thursday’s multimillion-dollar production a little ironic. Baseball’s spirituality, Heinze argues, comes from something much smaller: childhood, ritual and the stubborn idea that the game itself matters even after everything surrounding it has become a product. Kinsella put it less delicately: “Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.”

• Read the column: Phillies-Twins Field Of Dreams Game Shows Baseball’s Spirituality Prevades
• And here’s an encore of a story on how the Field of Dreams site came to be: Field Of Dreams Is America’s Hope For A Diamond In The Rough