Pulse: Chatter: Scavenger Hunt

If you drive Route 422, you’ve probably seen them near the Trooper Road exit: big black birds roosting atop the blue building on the north side of the road. They’re turkey vultures — technically, a flock of vultures is a “venue” — and now that a new sign announces the building as the headquarters of J.P. Mascaro & Sons, we asked the waste-management firm about them.

“Yeah,” Mascaro’s director of communications, Frank Sau, sighs. “They’re always there. They like our building. It’s a good vantage point.” Perhaps they feel a cosmic connection, since the vultures and Mascaro & Sons are both in waste management? Sau giggles. “Maybe,” he says, but rejects the notion of adopting the birds as a company symbol: “We already have a mascot. It’s an elephant.”

Though most people consider vultures pests, Sau says Mascaro is content to “cohabit peacefully” with its harbingers of death, adding, “We try not to affect the environment more than is necessary.” But doesn’t he find it curious his company is headquartered in Audubon, named for the famed avian artist? Not especially. He wants to talk instead about the new methane-to-electricity plant Mascaro just built … in Birdsboro.