Competition over rare and limited resources is an important evolutionary driver of behaviour. One such resource found in nature are carrion carcasses, which the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides depends on to breed. However, these carcasses are highly valuable and often bring these beetles into competition with other species, including opportunistic vertebrate scavengers. While we might predict the beetles should have some mechanism to deal with these encounters, little is known about how such interactions inform parental care decisions of N. vespilloides. Here, we test whether this includes facultative adjustments to parental care. We found that parents were slower to return to providing care when given cues that indicated vertebrate scavengers were present. Despite this, we found there was no difference in the overall amount of care parents provided, or in resulting larval fitness. Our results are consistent with previous work that shows while vertebrate competition does trigger a strong immediate response in these beetles, any long-term adjustments in parental behaviour are limited. This suggests that the selective pressure for long-term adjustments here is weak, and we find evidence that these beetles may instead rely on non-facultative behaviours such as concealing carrion to deal with asymmetric competition.