{"id":169540,"date":"2025-08-18T06:11:52","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=169540"},"modified":"2025-08-18T06:50:33","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:50:33","slug":"yesterdays-turkey-vultures-in-box-elder-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/18\/yesterdays-turkey-vultures-in-box-elder-county\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s Turkey Vultures In Box Elder County"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning’s weather forecast for Box Elder County called for sunny skies so I decided to make the long drive up there, mostly in the dark, to see what birds I might find.<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, the forecasters were wrong. Again.<\/p>\n

The entire area was socked in with clouds for most of the morning, including when I found this lone Turkey Vulture on the side of a cliff. I decided to take photos anyway, especially when I noticed that this bird seemed to have an unusual amount of white around ‘his’ eye.<\/p>\n

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These “warts, also called papillae or tubercles, are actually a fairly typical part of their facial structure. They vary in size and number from one vulture to another, with older vultures tending to have more of them.<\/p>\n

The exact reason for the presence of papillae isn’t definitely known but it’s thought that they may be related to the vulture’s diet of carrion and the potentially harmful bacteria it contains. Whatever the reason, this bird had more of them than usual.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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He repeatedly tried to throw a pellet. I’ve photographed many bird species casting pellets but never a vulture, so I had high hopes that he’d be successful.<\/p>\n

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He wasn’t, not while I was there. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.<\/p>\n

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He roused just before taking off but in this low light I didn’t have enough shutter speed for takeoff or flight shots, so they were soft.<\/p>\n

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Later that morning I found this vulture in better light. Here the bird is exercising its wings in case it decided to take off with me so close. It very nearly did take off but at the last second it changed its mind, so I never did get vulture takeoff shots.<\/p>\n

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It was late in the morning before the sun finally came out from behind all those clouds. I’ve always enjoyed the combination of vultures and sunflowers in my photos, so I took some shots of this guy. But I had to do some creative cropping to highlight both the vulture and the sunflowers.<\/p>\n

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Speaking of creative cropping.<\/p>\n

This adult and juvenile were feeding on a road killed rabbit. Vultures doing what vultures do.<\/p>\n

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I count at least 23 vultures in this photo. I could barely get all of them in frame, even with my ‘baby’ zoom lens cranked all the way down to only 100mm.<\/p>\n

As you can see, it was a vulture kind of morning and I’m fine with that. Soon they’ll be gone for the winter and I’ll be missing having them around.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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It was a Turkey Vulture kind of morning. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,910],"tags":[689,912,1957,1686,7880,7879,311,7878],"class_list":["post-169540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-turkey-vultures","tag-box-elder-county","tag-cathartes-aura","tag-papillae","tag-sunflowers","tag-trying-to-throw-a-pellet","tag-tubercles","tag-utah-2","tag-what-are-the-white-markings-around-the-eyes-of-turkey-vultures"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/turkey-vulture-4232-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-I6w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169540"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169582,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169540\/revisions\/169582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}