A man has shared a photograph of the alarming sight that greeted him out the window of the hospital where he works.
Pedro, an employee of the Base Hospital in Brasilia, Brazil, posted an image to Reddit under the handle u/drpedrico, of what he was confronted with when he took a look outside during a busy shift: a pair of vultures.
“Today, a couple of vultures appeared at the window of the surgical center where I work,” he wrote alongside the post. “A patient said he was scared. It was like they were waiting for him to die.”
Pedro told Newsweek: “I thought it was funny. I was impressed by the size of the birds, it’s not common, at least for me, to see wild animals so close.”
But while Pedro marvelled at the sight, it’s understandable others felt different. “Some nurses were scared,” he said. “The patient got a bit anxious too but was mostly joking about the situation.”
Many of those commenting on his Reddit post appeared to share these reservations. “The animal lover in me wants to say they’re just wanting to say hi, but the horror movie fan in me wants to say that they are indeed waiting for another soul to leave,” one user wrote.
Another said: “Vultures wouldn’t flock around like that unless they were already conditioned to be expecting a snack in that particular area.” A third, meanwhile, added: “That’s literally how they find food in nature.”
Vultures have an association with death that can be traced back to the Bible, where Jesus is quoted in Luke 17:37 as twice saying: “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”
But there is a scientific explanation. Vultures possess a keen sense of smell which is unique to the species and explains why they are drawn to dead animals.
Paul Wolterbeek, a volunteer program coordinator at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Arizona told Live Science: “They smell the unique sulfurous chemical compounds of decaying meat from high in the sky, then will circle around downwards until they find the aroma’s origin.”
Pedro was keen to downplay how frightened his patient was at seeing the vultures. “The patient was not really scared, he just got a bit more anxious,” he said. “By the end he was joking about the whole thing.”
It still made for a remarkable sight and one Pedro was eager to share to social media. “I had never seen them there. But I’ve been seeing many of them in Brasília last month. I think they are migrating and just happened to find a good place to rest in the hospital,” he said. “There are lots of caracaras and owls here too so they have to hide their nests from predators.”
The good news is that the vultures didn’t hang around too long. Pedro said they were gone within a day.