It is nearly 4 o’clock in the afternoon and Sue Cullen busies herself in the kitchen preparing dinner. She pulls some instant noodles from a now bare cupboard.

Twelve-year-old Craig and his younger sister, Cassandra, play with a friend in the living room. The television hums in the background, but no one is watching. With cable gone, wires now run from the set to the ceiling in a futile attempt to improve the signal. The image is still blurry; the reception weak.

An eviction notice delivered a month before keeps them on edge, fearing that the next knock on the door will be someone ordering them to leave. They have no place to go.

Outside, Daniel Cullen shows a reporter the 30-foot camper he had hoped would take the family to a new life somewhere across country. The plan vanished when the pickup truck to pull the camper was repossessed earlier that morning.

As he discusses the family’s latest setback, a neighbor walks up with a foil-wrapped dish of Swedish meatballs and hands it to Dan. He smiles, his eyes glisten. “You shouldn’t have.” Marion Borg shrugs, saying it is no big deal.

While they chat, some vultures approach the property from the east. Dan’s smile fades. “Isn’t that awful?” Borg says as she prepares to leave. “They are not beautiful anymore.”

Watching the birds take their place on the limbs of his trees, Dan goes quiet.

Engine noise from an approaching truck suddenly breaks the silence, startling the massive birds from their quiet rest. As if on cue, dozens of turkey vultures and black vultures emerge from the trees, filling the sky like a black cloud announcing an imminent storm. The birds circle silently, seemingly trying to find the source of the commotion. As the truck disappears, their attention shifts toward the grim-faced man below. A child walking her bike passes the house. Wide-eyed at the sight of the birds, she stumbles.

As suddenly as they had emerged, the massive birds disappear into the darkness, sheltered from view by the trees’ foliage.

Isn’t it ironic, Dan Cullen says, his eyes fixed on the birds, that we must leave but the vultures can stay.

DAN AND SUE CULLEN, stone masons by trade, bought the house at 145 Main St. in Hopkinton in March 2002.

After years of renting, the high school sweethearts were excited when they found the small house in Ashaway, a quaint village near the Westerly town line. Sue had grown up just one street over. With financial backing from Dan’s mother, Carla, they purchased the house for $152,500.

They knew the house needed some work. What they didn’t know is that they weren’t the only ones with a claim on the property.

Like many new homeowners, Dan and Sue set about cleaning up the yard and cutting the overgrown vegetation. Dan concentrated on scraping away a whitish, hard coating on the tree trunks and splattered on the ground. He thought it was resin, frozen through the winter.

One day, when another wave of nausea sent him to the bathroom to vomit, it clicked. Whatever was wrong had to be coming from the mysterious white substance. “It turned out, we are going out, working and getting sick,” Dan, 32, says.

The “resin,” he would later learn, was calcified vulture excrement.

WHEN THE CULLENS moved in, the birds were off nesting, most likely somewhere in the south. The family didn’t think much of it when a single vulture, or even an occasional group, showed up in the heat of that first summer. In a rural community like Hopkinton, wildlife abounds.

By Halloween, however, masses of turkey vultures and black vultures were roosting on the property. They left sometime in the spring. The largely vulture-free summer that followed led them to hope the birds’ presence had been a one-time phenomenon.

Then fall came and so did the vultures. This time they arrived earlier and in larger numbers.

Dan remembers his first attempt to get help. Looking through government listings in the phone book, he found a number for “wildlife problems” under the state Department of Environmental Management. He says the man who answered his phone call questioned why he was calling the DEM. Puzzled and a bit irritated, Dan responded: “Isn’t this number for wildlife problems? I have a wildlife problem.” The man told him something he would hear over and over again in the years ahead: vultures are protected by the federal government from destruction or even harassment under the l918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Harm them and you’ll face up to $15,000 in fines or six months in jail.

DEM referred Dan to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service where officials repeated the warning and recommended he try to disperse the birds using “non-lethal” methods.

DAN CULLEN TRIED the obvious: cutting down trees and trimming limbs to reduce the options for roosting.

He says he couldn’t find an arborist to take the job so he tried to do it himself. He got sick.

“Then my neighbor [Ben York] came over, and he got sick.”

Bouts of nausea and diarrhea convinced them to stop.

The Cullens resorted to banging pots and pans, blowing air horns, flying kites, floating large helium-filled Mylar balloons and shooting firecrackers.

They bought scent spray, only to later learn black vultures don’t have a good sense of smell. It didn’t bother the turkey vultures either, though they do have a heightened sense of smell.

They even got an Australian shepherd because they were told a dog’s bark would scare the birds.

The barking worsened their already thorny relationship with new next-door neighbors; the dog got a skin infection, and the birds stayed put.

Nothing worked. Vultures by the hundreds kept roosting on their property.

The Cullens gave the dog away.

VULTURE POPULATIONS have been growing over the years, particularly in the Southeast, although they are progressively expanding their territory north. As their numbers have increased, so has the length of their unwanted stay.

Turkey vultures became a common sight in New England in the 1950s and black vultures became relatively common in the mid-90s, says Shaibal Mitra, a field ornithologist who grew up in South County and now works for the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island.

With an average weight of 4 pounds and a wingspan of up to 6 feet, turkey vultures — the most numerous in Ashaway — are the larger of the two species. They are predominantly dark brown or black with a featherless, bright red (adult) or brown (juvenile) head and a relatively long, narrow tail. Black vultures, which have a shorter, wider tail, weigh less than 4 pounds and have a wingspan of less than 5 feet.

It takes a federal depredation permit, co-signed by state wildlife authorities, to trap, kill or relocate the animals. Vultures can be dispersed without a permit “with the caveat that you are not disturbing them during nesting,” says Monte D. Chandler, regional wildlife services director of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Vultures feed mostly on carrion, although black vultures sometimes prey on domestic fowl and livestock. They have been welcomed in some areas — and introduced in others — for their road-kill cleanup services.

Contrary to what people think, vultures are not always just scavengers, Chandler points out. “They do prey.”

Dan and Sue Cullen say the vultures that roost on their property prefer live kill.

“They took a squirrel right out of our tree,” confirms Ben York, who lives across the street.

Dan bends down to pick up their seven-year-old white cat Hsiu Chien, named after a Bruce Lee movie character, and points at scars on his head. The wound was caused by the talons of a vulture that tried to stomp on the cat, he says. On a previous occasion, he says, a vulture grabbed Hsiu Chien and tried to lift him.

New World vultures have strong bills for pulling and tearing, but their feet are usually too weak to lift or carry food. They typically step on their food to hold it in place and then peck at it.

MITRA SAYS he first learned of the roost at the Cullen’s home in the winter of 1999-2000, two years before the family bought the house, and has seen both vulture species at the site during the Audubon Society’s annual bird counts since 2002. He says there are at least two other vulture roosts in Hopkinton near Route 3, but the roost on the Cullens’ property is the only one near a home; the others are in more isolated areas.

Birdwatchers from as far away as Ohio and Maryland come to the neighborhood to observe the vultures. Most watch from across the street or park by the nearby First Hopkinton Seventh Day Baptist Church. Some, Dan says, have walked right onto the Cullen property.

Nobody knows why the birds first picked the Cullens’ trees as their winter roost, but once a good site is found, vultures return year after year. It’s known in the field as site tenacity.

The Cullens bought the property from the children of the late Catherine M. Cawley, who had attempted for years to disperse the vultures with air horns and other noise devices. “Approximately at 6:30 at night, she would go out there with pots and pans,” says Councilman Thomas E. Buck, who lives around the corner. “You could almost set your clock by it.”

Buck remembers seeing the birds around for at least 15 to 20 years. He says he never thought much about them until the Cullens’ case started gaining attention.

“It’s like somebody living next to a train track,” Buck says. “After a while, you don’t feel the train anymore.”

EFFORTS TO DISPERSE the vultures stretched the Cullens’ household budget from the outset. They were spending money on fighting the vulture incursion while paying for home improvement projects and financing the startup of their masonry and chimney-cleaning business. New setbacks, like discovering a problem with their well, added to their financial burdens.

“I’d come down and I’d feel fine. I’d have a glass of water and a little while later, I don’t feel good [anymore] and I’m in the bathroom and I’m throwing up,” Dan recalls.

The family stopped using their well water for drinking or cooking during the summer of 2003 and started buying bottled water or using water from a neighbor.

They had their well tested. To their surprise, the test came back clean. It turns out they had tested the wrong well — one that had been taken out of service because of its proximity to a septic system. Technicians from the company showed them where their drinking well was located — under the vulture roost. As expected, tests showed the water was contaminated with bird droppings and presented a coliform and salmonella threat.

FEARING FOR their health, the Cullens intensified their efforts to rid their property of the vultures. Years of exposure to the birds’ excrement had already contaminated their soil and the well. They were convinced that the vultures were responsible for their son Craig’s asthma, Dan’s Lyme disease, and the frequent nausea and diarrhea everyone suffered.

Attempts to disturb the birds backfired. Their neighbors got upset and the vultures retaliated.

In November 2004, while Dan was out shooting at the trees, neighbor Douglas Paquette called the police complaining that his wife had seen Dan shooting a firearm, possibly a pellet gun. Patrolman Thomas J. Quaratella went to the Cullens’ home and found that Dan had been using a paintball gun. Concluding that no law had been violated, he left.

A month later, the neighbors called DEM and the police when they heard shouting coming from the Cullen property. Dan, who had been out using the paintball gun, says a birdwatcher participating in the annual count attacked him with sticks and tried to take the gun.

The officers tried to quiet things down.Lt. Michael P. Longtin of DEM told Cullen to “avoid confrontation” by refraining from shooting at the birds when people are watching and Officer Quaratella told Cullen to post no trespassing signs and “to use his judgment when to scatter the birds.”

Dan says the incident left him frustrated because nobody seemed to care about his family’s plight. At one point, he threatened to level the property of all its trees. But, he says, Longtin told him that he couldn’t do that because it amounted to “habitat alteration.”

A spokesperson denies that anyone at DEM told Dan he couldn’t remove trees on his property; Longtin’s report of the birdwatcher episode makes no mention of it.

Dan stashed the paintball gun and tried other ways to make the vultures leave.

He bought a critter blaster, which produces supersonic sounds, to annoy the birds. At most, the vultures would leave the roost, circle the property and return.

He bought a propane cannon, which discharges regulated sonic blasts to frighten and disorient birds. The vultures didn’t even budge.

He mounted a motion-activated scarecrow on the roof to blast water at the birds. The water formed puddles by the sidewalk in front of the house. The water froze, causing complaints.

The activity didn’t scare the birds away, it made them vomit partially digested food on the ground beneath..

INCREASINGLY FED UP, Dan bombarded state and federal wildlife officials with more pleas for help and called everyone else he could think of, including the governor’s office and land conservancy organizations. He also left messages and visited the Hopkinton Town Hall, where his problem got lost in a shuffle of town managers — Hopkinton has gone through at least five town managers since the Cullens bought their house.

In January 2005, USDA staff members finally agreed to help the Cullens obtain a depredation permit. The permit, issued just a month later, gave him license to “take” up to 20 turkey vultures with an air rifle.

He bought a high-powered air rifle capable of shooting pointed field pellets at 1,000 feet per second and started shooting at the birds right away. Records say he killed 11 vultures during the year covered by the permit.

He hung two of the birds’ carcasses from the trees. According to experts, the presence of a dead bird often deters other birds from roosting. It didn’t work. He burned the other carcasses in an open pit in the backyard.

Sometime in 2006, Dan says Police Chief John S. Scuncio told him to stop using the air rifle because discharging a weapon near a dwelling is illegal. Repeated attempts to talk with Scuncio about that encounter and the vulture problem in town have been ignored.

Dan put the rifle aside and returned to using the paintball gun.

THE FAMILY’S FINANCES spiraled out of control last winter.

The years of fighting the vultures, by their own account, had cost them plenty: $500 on veterinary bills; $4,000 on devices to scare the vultures away, $2,500 on tree removal and thinning of the roost, and more than $100 a year on phone calls to government officials.

The Cullens fell behind in their mortgage payments.

Making matters worse, their business, Chimney Swift, had no money coming in. GMH Military Housing, a company based in Newtown Square, Pa., which has a contract with the U.S. Navy, hired Dan and Sue to inspect, clean and rebuild chimneys on military housing in Newport. They say they did the work but, due to administrative delays, didn’t get paid from November 2005, to late February 2006.

“When you pay out everything, and they don’t pay you for four months,” it starts to take a toll, Dan says.

“….it was either paying your mortgage or paying your health insurance,” he says.

“And food,” adds Sue, his 31-year-old wife.

They had hoped being a vendor for a Navy contractor would help grow their new business.

Looking back, Dan, with a hint of regret, wonders whether they would have been better off sticking to residential customers. But, even some of those customers didn’t pay. He says the business is owed about $3,800 that he doesn’t expect to recoup.

As their mortgage delinquency grew, they weighed their options.

By then, however, “there [was] just no way to get from under it,” Dan says. Others “would have equity [and] they would have sold their house.” They tried but couldn’t.

Unable to pay soaring construction liability insurance costs, their company went first. They sold most of the equipment and tools, but it wasn’t enough. Next went their health insurance.

The hole became deeper every month.

Family emergencies, including the death of Sue’s mother, placing Dan’s grandmother in a nursing home, and repairing his mother’s car, claimed their available cash.

As a last resort to save their home, they paid $625 to Credit Counseling Bureau, in North Attleboro, to avoid foreclosure. It was money wasted, Sue says. CCB’s Manager Paul Rose says the company worked out an arrangement but “they unfortunately were unable to do it.”

As the summer of 2006 neared the end, the house was taken back at a foreclosure sale by JP Morgan Chase Bank. On Aug. 30, they officially lost their house.

EARLIER IN THE SUMMER, Dan and Sue felt a glimmer of hope.

In late June, town officials, including a new town manager, William A. DiLibero, finally agreed to help.

DiLibero told the Town Council he would look into the Cullen problem and actually received a federal permit allowing the town to kill some vultures if they land on public property. The tax assessor, Margaret M. Hardiman, convinced that the Cullens had a contamination problem, agreed to recommend a full abatement of their $3,119 in annual property taxes until the problem was solved. Dan was even hopeful that the council would allow him to resume killing the vultures on his property.

To help them document their problems, they asked the Department of Health about the health hazards associated with vultures. Dr. Utpala Bandy, director of the state Health Department’s Office of Communicable Disease Center for Epidemiology, sent them a letter July 28, saying that people “living in close proximity” to vultures may be exposed to diarrhea-producing bacteria in the vultures’ droppings and vomit; mosquito-borne diseases, such as West Nile virus and bird flu, and diseases associated with the propagation of fleas and ticks. There is also the possibility of physical attacks on small children and animals, she wrote.

By then, however, all hope had evaporated. The tax assessor had been fired, and consideration of a tax abatement was derailed because, according to DiLibero, the new assessor was not inclined to recommend an abatement and the Cullens would not agree to use their tax savings to remove trees. Besides, DiLibero said, “I’ve never seen any documentation of the water being contaminated or any causal relationship between the … vultures and the problems that have resulted there.”

Not true, Dan says.

Dan says he and his wife showed DiLibero, previous town managers, and the previous tax assessor an array of papers documenting the contamination and their efforts to deal with the vultures over the past 4½ years.

DiLibero later said he saw some papers but does not recall seeing any related to contamination.

IT DIDN’T HELP that the massive birds of prey escaped the notice of those who could actually do something for the Cullens. The neighbors could see them, the birdwatchers could count them, the Cullens could videotape them, but when town police, the town manager, or federal wildlife officials visited the area, the birds were nowhere to be seen.

When staffers from the USDA visited the Cullen property on Feb.15, 2005, June 29, 2006, and Aug. 22, 2006, they reported no sightings. “I can’t make recommendations when I don’t see any birds,” Chandler said in an interview.

Local police were asked to monitor the situation, but they, too, reported no birds.

The Cullens erupted on Oct. 26. Even though they had lost their home, they were still looking for someone in officialdom to acknowledge their problem. On that day, the vultures were everywhere and they wanted their presence documented. They called DiLibero, the town manager; they called Chandler, the regional wildlife director for USDA, and they called the police, and everyone else they could think of.

When Sgt. William C. Giorgetti arrived at their house just before dusk, Dan, Sue and both children met him in the yard. The Cullens pointed to the trees, saying something to the effect of, “There they are, just like we’ve been telling you people.” Giorgetti counted up to 30 of the massive birds.

Sue said Cassandra and Craig were almost attacked that morning on their way to the school bus stop. “We’ve been telling you people for five years about this and nobody wants to do nothing,” she told the police officer.

Dan pointed out droppings in the yard and said he had shown them to Giorgetti before.

Giorgetti told Dan that he had been monitoring the property for the last two to three weeks and hadn’t seen any vultures or droppings, except on the public sidewalk in front of the property.

During the commotion, Chandler and Lauren Rickman, a USDA wildlife technician, arrived from their offices in Amherst, Mass. Dan and Sue immediately directed their anger at Chandler. The confrontation got so heated that Giorgetti told Sue to either calm down or go inside. As the tension escalated, Dan told Chandler that he was going to harass his office until he (Dan) either moves away or dies.

About then neighbor Ben York joined the crowd, trying to mediate the dispute. York said the birds had been back for some time, but acknowledged it’s difficult to see them when officers drive by the neighborhood as the vultures often blend into the trees.

As the shouting continued, Rickman went about her job of taking samples of excrement to test for Avian Influenza.

AFTER THAT BOISTEROUS night, Chandler and DiLibero began brainstorming on how to break up the roost.

Since the property no longer belonged to the Cullens, DiLibero negotiated directly with JP Morgan Chase Bank.

The mortgage company, DiLibero says, agreed to cut down some trees and trim some branches to minimize options for roosting, while town police would fire pyrotechnics at the trees as reinforcement. As a last resort, some vultures would be killed.

A solution was taking shape.

One problem was ruled out. Environmental tests of the fecal matter taken that tumultuous night in October revealed only the low pathogenic bird flu viruses commonly found in wild birds. They posed no threat to human health, according to the USDA.

Yet, given the magnitude of the situation, Chandler says, it could take two to three years of continuous harassment to disperse the birds, and the town needs to be involved.

“If you are going to move a vulture roost, you want to make sure that the town knows what’s going on and it has the work force in place to do the dispersal,” Chandler says. Otherwise the birds would only relocate to another nearby property.

A Channel 12 news broadcast about the vulture problem quoted Police Chief Scuncio: “. . . we’ve got a plan to relocate the birds without having to destroy them.” That plan, worked out with the USDA, he said, would involve the use of “cracker rounds” to scare the birds. A letter was mailed on Nov. 17 to homeowners within 1½-mile radius of the Cullen’s house, informing them of the wildlife management activities that were to start after Thanksgiving.

That’s how the Cullens learned of the town-supported initiative that they had wanted for so long.

But they wouldn’t be around to see if it worked. On Nov. 20, they received an eviction notice from the mortgage company giving them 20 days to leave the premises.

Their son was recovering from an emergency appendectomy when the notice arrived.

The following day, Dan and Sue were out chopping wood to warm the house before Cassandra returned from school.

“We don’t have a penny to our name. It’s all in here,” Sue says.

“We wanted to live here forever,” her husband adds, looking up at the birds and then to his wife as if looking for moral support or forgiveness.

“We were hoping to sink the money into” the house “instead of sinking it into toys for the vultures,” he said, pausing and then adding, “They stopped me from harassing them, from cutting trees, and we just suffered every inch of the way. We’ve lost even this. We’ve got no home now. We’ve got no money.”

Holding a large envelope stuffed with letters from politicians and experts, copies of vulture management literature and descriptions of recommended devices that did little, or nothing, to scare the vultures, Dan says: “Our family had a budget and the vultures didn’t fit in.”

THE LONG-AWAITED dispersal never got off the ground.

The November election brought a new Town Council, one that did not want to get involved.

“In the prior council, there were members very concerned that we do something about this situation,” DiLibero says. The current council thinks “this is a private matter and it should either be addressed by the DEM or the property owners.”

“People are concerned because it’s a private property and we are taking action to address what’s a nuisance to some people and not a nuisance to others,” DiLibero says, adding it would put the town in a difficult position when residents complain about damages created by other wildlife, such as deer.

In a recent interview Buck, the new councilman who pushed for the town not getting involved, explained: “Right now, those birds are under the jurisdiction of the USDA. If the town has anything to do with moving those birds and they go over to someone else’s property, then we become liable.”

Buck, who lives near the Cullens, later acknowledged that he recently shot some fireworks to scatter vultures on his trees.

Tagged for removal since November, a group of Eastern white pines — the vultures’ preferred site — still stands, towering roughly 85 feet into the sky.

Dan says when representatives of two tree-cutting companies came knocking to ask about the white build-up on the trees, he and Sue showed them some of their documents. They never came back. When representatives of a third company showed up, Dan says, DiLibero was with them. Dan says DiLibero accused the Cullens of scaring away potential bidders by talking about the vultures.

DiLibero will not confirm or deny that encounter.

The town manager shrugs when asked why the trees are still standing.

LAST TUESDAY evening, Dan and Sue and their two children cuddle up under blankets in the living room. With temperatures outside in the teens, a space heater warms the living room and a wood-burning stove keeps the kitchen toasty warm.

They are all eating popcorn as they watch Big Fish, a movie they borrowed from the library. The microwave gone, Dan heated kernels of corn in a pan on the stove. They pop better that way, Dan says.

The eviction deadline has long passed, but no one has shown up yet to order them to leave. The family will stay until they are “booted out.”

The mood is upbeat. Dan says he will soon start two jobs, one at a fast-food restaurant in Connecticut, another at an auto-parts store in Wakefield. That morning, the 1992 Dodge Ram van he bought for a few hundred dollars from a friend passed inspection. It can pull the camper.

The last two months have been tough, but a few neighbors, especially the Yorks, have reached out to help, allowing them to use their phones and giving them food, clean water, and loads of pallets which they’ve cut for firewood. Their church pastor makes sure they get to a soup kitchen every Monday night where, during their last visit, Dan struck gold, sort of, by winning a $10 Stop & Shop gift card.

To keep warm, Dan, Sue and Cassandra now share an upstairs bedroom. Apprehensive of the birdwatchers, Craig abandoned his first-floor room for the couch long ago. They coordinate showers so they can keep the boiler off as much as possible.

Taking a break from the movie, the family gathers in the kitchen. A question about the town’s retreat from an effort to remove the vulture roost forces Dan to relive his own campaign, an exercise that triggers bad memories.

“We were screwed every which way we turned,” he says, growing irritated. “If we sent them [vultures] to another house, we could be sued. If we cut the trees down, there would be repercussions. If we shot them, we’d break the law.”

At times he wonders whether it would have been better to ignore all those government warnings about vultures being a protected species. “If I had just gone out there five years ago and blasted them, it would have been a done deal by now,” he says. Asking for leniency from a jury of your peers, Dan says, would have been easier than asking government officials for help.

Last November the Cullens said they were headed for Montana to start a new life. They’ve changed their minds, but are no longer eager to share their new destination. About the only thing they’ll say is that they are going west, far, far away from Rhode Island and the vultures.

marmenta@projo.com