South Florida fisherman helps save vultures stranded over Gulf of Mexico

It was raining turkey vultures over the Gulf of Mexico 35 miles off Islamorada, with land nowhere in sight.

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Charter captain Brandon Storin was guiding some sport fishermen when they came across the strange sight and captured the whole thing on video.

“All of a sudden two turkey vultures just swooped by my boat,” said Storin. “I remember even ducking. They’re probably looking to try to land on my boat. But I was like, whoa.”

But it wasn’t just two. Storin soon realized there were dozens of raptors struggling in the water. Most of them had already drowned.

“Then there’s like a big congregate pile of them, because they’re all trying to stand on each other to avoid drowning,” said Storin. “But there’s only about 15 or so still alive out of the group of, like, oh, 130 150 of them.”

Storin says that’s when instinct kicked in and the group worked together to save as many of the birds as they could, scooping them up with a fishing net and bringing the survivors on board the boat.

“When I saw them in the water, and I saw there’s some survivors,” he said. “I couldn’t just sit there and watch them drown.”

Storin said he’d heard stories from other boat captains who’ve witnessed the same bizarre event before, triggered they believe by a sudden change in wind direction that blew the vultures way off course.

“It’s what happens when the wind switches from coming out the north to switching out the east and then the south,” he said. “It pushes them away from the islands, and they’re not flappers.”

But dry land was nowhere in sight, so Storin took the rescued birds to Little Rabbit Key, about 14 miles off Islamorada, and reported the incident to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

“I like to think, in their head, if I could speak vulture, that they were saying thank you to me while I was letting them go,” he said.

Storin also said that before the wild encounter, the fishing trip was a dud and nothing was biting, but everything changed for his angler clients after they rescued the birds.

“I tell you what, our luck after that moment picked up that day,” he said. “So they were very happy. So was I and so were those vultures.”