TZOPĪLŌ-TL, Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) and Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) [FC: 42 Tzopilotl] “It is black, dirty black, chili-red-headed, chalky-legged. All its food is what has died – stinking, filthy.” This describes the Turkey Vulture, though Martin del Campo gives priority to the Black Vulture. The name apparently applied equally to both species. Clearly, the Aztecs shared our modern sensibilities with respect to these carrion feeders.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1963); Rafael Martín del Campo, “Ensayo de interpretación del Libro Undecimo de la Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España de Fray Bernardino de Sahagún – 11 Las Aves (1),” Anales del Instituto de Biología Tomo XI, Núm. 1 (México, D.F., 1940); and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.
Taken into Spanish as zopilote.
tzopilotl = buzzard, vulture
James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 241.
auh y tototzitzintin yn cacalome yn tzotzo pilo[me] [f. 30v] niman muchin tlalpan huetzque ça papatlacatinemia huel otlaocoltzatzatzique = and the little birds, the crows, the buzzards, all fell on the ground and went about fluttering and making very mournful cries
Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, ed. and transl. Camilla Townsend, with an essay by James Lockhart (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 154–155.
Tepal nitzopiloti. = With someone's help I became a vulture.
Thelma D. Sullivan, "Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums, and Metaphors, Collected by Sahagún," Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 4 (1963), 116–117.