Vultures of Emma Willard

Dia K. ’24, Robyn W. ’24, and the winged figures in the wide-arched sky.

BY KAITLIN RESLER

There are many unique qualities the Emma Willard School campus has to offer: the collegiate gothic style designed by the Olmstead Brothers include the tower, many castellations, parapets, finials, spandrels, and buttresses. Alongside these architectural wonders, eyes gaze down at the inner campus from gargoyles, grotesques, and the only living watchers from the grey walls: vultures.

Often, morning on campus sees the vultures on the top of Sage and Slocum halls, their claws gripping the tops of the roof or edge of the tower, wings outstretched towards the sun to burn away the last bits of morning mist. Warming themselves, the vultures look gothic and ominous, but these shy creatures signal the healthy and complex ecosystem on Mount Ida.

Though many in our campus community are fond of them, it was Dia K. ’24 who took the interest a step further for her STEAM10 project last year and embarked on research that would become the VulturesofEmma.org website.

“I really love birds,” Dia says, tracing the origins of her interest to childhood. At Emma, Dia noticed the wide variety of birds on campus. Compared to her previous school, the Emma campus was full of catbirds, robins, cardinals, hawks, doves, bluebirds, and of course vultures. Not just an imposing silhouette atop the buildings, these large birds glide across the wide sky with wingspans that can reach 178 cm (70.1 inches).

“I noticed these huge birds and no one really knew anything about them! I was asking people and they were mostly saying, I don’t know, crows maybe, or hawks? I was like that’s not a crow, and definitely not a hawk!”