In the display in front of us, on the right side, stands a proud and majestic vulture. How did it get here? The elders of the moshav relate that in the late forties, the children went on a hike on the Carmel with their teacher, Menachem Zaharoni. 

Suddenly, they noticed a vulture’s nest with a baby vulture inside, on a stone ledge at the top of a cliff. One of the boys, Avram Duvid, volunteered for the dangerous task and rappelled down with a rope until he reached the nest. He took the baby vulture, and the children brought it to the school’s petting zoo.  Of course, touching and taking wild animals is forbidden today, but back then, nature preservation laws had not yet been made. 

Years later, the teacher felt sorry about this story and wrote, “The group of children at Kfar Yehoshua was building their petting zoo at the time. We wanted to enrich it with a young vulture, and we did something that I have never done before and will never repeat.” 

The little vulture, who was named Nishri, grew up in a cage in the petting zoo, and the children took turns taking care of him. They would walk between the chicken coops in the moshav and search for dead chickens to feed the vulture, who was a big eater and would even swallow the flesh with the feathers still attached. 

Nishri grew up and developed nicely, but because it was raised in captivity, it never learned how to fly, and it would walk around the school yard and play with the children. When it got older, it would go out and stroll around the moshav, sometimes even playing and pulling at the girls’ dresses. The beloved vulture was an inseparable part of the moshav’s landscape for eleven years, until one day, it walked all the way to the Valley Train Station at the edge of the village, and since it wasn’t afraid of humans, it came close to the station workers too. 

One of the workers, Tawfik the hunter, was a friend of Menachem Zaharoni, and was familiar with his taxidermy collection. He shot the vulture and brought the body to Menachem as a gift. When he saw Menachem’s horrified face, he realized his mistake, placed the vulture on the ground, and ran away. The children of the moshav mourned their beloved vulture for a long time, which has remained forever frozen in the display case.