Remember the early years of the web? Maybe not. Maybe you're too young, and all you've known has been the social, corporate internet of the 2010s and 20s. If so, trust us. It wasn't always like this. At first, the web was smaller, but felt bigger, because everywhere you looked, someone was building something unique. People brought their individual hobbies, expertise, and obsessions online, and every new site was a window into some stranger's life: the thing that got them out of bed in the morning.

We can go back. We would argue that, as Jack said in LOST, we have to go back.

We can't remake the entire web, and time travel remains elusive. What we can do is make a site like the imperfect, personal, beautiful sites of the past, and that is what we have tried to do.

We. Love. Vultures. We love them for their usefulness, their ecosystem services, their value to both us and the rest of the natural world. But we also love them for themselves. They are, in their own right, beautiful and majestic birds. They deserve appreciation, and study. They deserve celebration. And more than anything, this site exists to celebrate vultures.

Policies

One of the things that frankly sucks about the internet today is that it seems to mostly exist as a data harvesting tool. We trade our attention for "free" services that pay for themselves by gathering, packaging and selling our personal data to advertisers and others. We don't believe that's as good of a deal as it is often presented. So we're not doing it.

There is absolutely no tracking on this website. No Facebook pixels, no Google Analytics. Nothing. Sites can promise - hand on heart - that they won't sell your data, but really, the only way to guarantee that is not to collect it in the first place. That means we don't really know how many people are visiting or using All About Vultures. That's okay, because true to the original spirit of that long-lost early web, we don't really care. We made this site for us, and people like us who love vultures. If people find and make use of this site, that's great. We love that. If they don't, we'll just keep right on building and using it for ourselves.

But, you may ask, how do you make money? At the moment, we don't. We have jobs, which pay us money in exchange for a large portion of our time. What time we have left, we spend on our families, friends, and this project. If this site was anyone's full time job, it would look a lot better than it does, but it would also have to support that person. We may, at some point, sell (sustainable, high quality) t-shirts or something, to make a little side hustle cash and pay ourselves back for the site's hosting fees. We'll let you know if we do that. But for now, this is an utterly non-commercial place. No ads, no tracking, no sales. Just information, for free. Because we really do believe that is what the web was meant to be.

So, enjoy it. Use it. Mock it for its terrible design. Whatever you want. We'll just keep plugging away at it, updating it with news and research and all sorts of vulture goodness. We sincerely wish you a great day, and that you see a vulture today. Every day is better with a vulture.