A framed cartoon on the wall of my mother’s powder room depicts a pair of randy-looking satyrs spying through binoculars at some Rubenesque bathing nymphs.

“There’s a pink-breasted bird of paradise, a pearly bottomed chickadee, two round-bellied warblers and a great horny night owl,” one says to the other.

In her kitchen another cartoon shows a man summoning his wife to say goodbye to a robin in a snowstorm outside, poised with scarf and suitcase for his journey south.

My mother once kept a quail as a pet and has trained generations of brown thrashers to come to her call from the woods behind her Ozark home. From such maternal influence, I’ve inherited an interest in our feathered friends.

My recent move to the country has gratified the interest. The list of different species I’ve spotted within walking distance of the house has grown beyond 50, including dickcissels, egrets, herons, grebes, snipes, orioles, buntings and all manner of ducks, hawks and owls. In this small domain, I consider myself a Croesus of bird watchers.

Upland plovers and scissor-tailed flycatchers have been among my distinguished visitors. The most exotic apparition was a bird with a long, curved beak and iridescent, cinnamon-colored feathers which I identified as a glossy ibis.

My neighbor, ornithologist Bill Busby, advised me that it was most likely a white-faced ibis, which has been sighted a handful of times in the Baker Wetlands. (Another kind of wealth in our community is the accessibility of such expertise.)

Spring is prime bird watching time around our Vinland hill. A restlessness of migrations is in the air. Teal, baldpates, pintails, gadwall, shovellers, scaup and buffleheads dropped down on our pond to fatten up before the final push to their northern nesting grounds.

Signs of amorous excitement were also everywhere. Turkeys gobbled urgently in the woods along Coal Creek. A solitary kestrel, who’d caught mice all winter long in our front yard, showed up one morning with a lady friend, and a pair of red-tailed hawks appeared to be working on a nest.

One day in early April, a pair of meadowlarks did the tango in midair after the male  a dapper country gentleman with a dark cravat and a yellow vest  strutted and puffed up his chest feathers like a junior prairie chicken. Quail began whistling in the meadows and a killdeer ran along the gravel driveway faking a broken wing to protect its nest.

Birds have a special claim on our imaginations. They evoke thoughts of freedom and even immortality. I rejoice in their company. But one couple tested my affection when they made their debut.

They were turkey vultures and although they projected a gallows image and seemed like harbingers of doom, it was clear they intended to take up housekeeping and raise a brood. I shuddered when I saw them with their bare, bristled necks and beady eyes perched shoulder to shoulder on the roof of the barn.

They had perfected the mannerisms of the mortician  or perhaps the morticians have learned from them. They looked away deferentially when I passed. They made scarcely a whisper when they rose and took flight, their elegiac wing sweeps suggested the gestures of a funeral director ushering mourners down the aisle.

It gave me a chill when they passed over, casting their shadows on my path.

I recognize that my revulsion to the buzzards is irrational and unfair. After all, they perform a valuable sanitary service. The world would be more unsavory without them.

Moreover, according to what decree are swans beautiful and vultures ugly? According to a subjective, eye-of-the-beholder standard, for sure. Buzzards, as well as eagles, soar. From the male buzzard’s point of view, I’m sure his mate is a knock-out, the incarnation of beauty. The idea of coupling with a swan would probably make him ill.

One morning we watched the buzzards mate, a solemn affair. I tried to drive the morbid thoughts from my mind. Afterward, the one I took for “she” sat alone on a fence post, pondering. I have no doubt that love and motherhood were on her mind.

Still I find myself wondering  What does he say when he’s courting? “Darling, you’re looking positively putrid today?” And what fond names will they bestow on their offspring? Rotten, Rancid, Fetid, Vile? Do they prefer their carrion fresh or well-spoiled?

The buzzards give us much to muse upon.

 George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.