I’m returning from the Irazú volcano when I see a dark-headed vulture gliding over a field. Curious about what drew it there, I pull the car over to the roadside. In the sky, other vultures trace slow circles. Through my binoculars I see that their heads aren’t black, but red.
Back home, I look them up. The red-headed vultures have an extraordinary sense of smell: they can detect from the air the compounds released by a decomposing body, even from more than two kilometres away. Their eyesight is also exceptional. From above they notice subtle changes in the landscape —the glint of skin, the stir of another animal— and when they locate their feast, they descend like hunger-driven propellers.
They don’t need to kill. They only need to arrive on time —preferably before the black-headed ones steal their meal.
Vultures eat what no one else wants to touch, and by doing so, they clean. Their stomachs are tiny laboratories that neutralize toxins, turning what would be poison for others into fertilizer. Without meaning to, they earn the gold medal for biological recycling.
Scavengers of the Past
Scavengers have also left their mark on the history of our planet. Around 66 million years ago, when the impact of an asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs, the first mammals —small, opportunistic, omnivorous— took advantage of the abundance of organic matter to survive and help restore ecological cycles after the catastrophe.
Much earlier, in the Cambrian seas —about 540 million years ago— jawless creatures slid along the ocean floor, sucking up soft bodies that had fallen from above. In several places on Earth, their shapes remain imprinted: worms covered in tiny spines and trilobites that stirred the sediment in search of remains. Death was already feeding life.
Through time, Earth has transformed matter in countless ways. The very elements that make up a vulture —iron, calcium, carbon— once moved through volcanoes, corals, and ancient forests long before humans existed. The same Irazú, which has hurled ash and boulders onto nearby pastures, reminds us that the planet recycles itself: what is now rock dust will soon become soil, then life, and someday, nourishment for others.
Because matter is never lost; it only changes form. Fragments of a comet, ashes from a volcano, the bones of an animal —all are part of the same cycle. At the heart of this constant exchange is carbon, traveling tirelessly from body to rock, from soil to air, and returning, again, to life.
Learning to Let Go
The red-headed vultures keep drawing circles in the Irazú sky, in no hurry to touch the ground. With enviable patience, they display a silent acceptance of the world’s order. I watch them glide for more than ten minutes. They drift in slow spirals, adjusting their course with the faintest turn of a wing. Their flight doesn’t cut through the air —it inhabits it. From below they seem suspended, held up by an invisible force.
I still can’t spot the carcass, but I notice that the black-headed vultures are gone. Influenced by a childhood idea, I imagine them as death’s masked actors, tearing flesh in a scene of horror. But then it strikes me: they aren’t the killers of the story, but the custodians of transformation. They don’t resist the natural course of things —they enable it.
These birds, I think, teach us how to let go and accept. They fly when they sense a scent, wait a while, and then a little longer; they eat and depart once nothing is left. In that calm lies, perhaps, a deeper lesson: that letting go is not surrendering but making room for change. That what we love —a landscape, a person— is also made of the same traveling carbon, of matter that never disappears, only settles into other bodies or other minerals.
Before becoming what we are, we have been tree, bird, volcano. We are recycled dust that sometimes breathes for an instant before moving on in its cycle. On that slope of the Irazú, among ashes and vultures, death is merely a pause —a breath of the Earth before it creates again.