{"id":48463,"date":"2017-05-23T06:26:55","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T12:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=48463"},"modified":"2017-05-23T06:39:04","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T12:39:04","slug":"turkey-vultures-doing-what-turkey-vultures-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/23\/turkey-vultures-doing-what-turkey-vultures-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey Vultures Doing What Turkey Vultures Do"},"content":{"rendered":"

These recent images illustrate three favorite pastimes of Turkey Vultures.<\/p>\n

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The flight mode of Turkey Vultures is almost entirely gliding and soaring and they\u00a0do it effortlessly for hours on end. Birds of North America Online reports their soaring abilities to be “vastly superior to those of Buteo<\/em> hawks”. I often watch them through my lens as they use mountain updrafts for lift and circle endlessly on them\u00a0with very little effort.<\/p>\n

While I’m watching\u00a0them in flight\u00a0I don’t often click my shutter because\u00a0their dark plumage is\u00a0usually backlit but yesterday morning I caught this one in a near-vertical bank that put decent light on its ventral surfaces and I think the direct eye contact with the red head outlined in black helps to draw the viewer in.<\/p>\n

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Understandably I have mixed emotions about this photo, also from yesterday morning. The setting is an ugly road, the soiled vulture is far from\u00a0aesthetically appealing and the roadkill is one of my very\u00a0favorite critters – a Long-tailed Weasel. Vultures are often seen waiting at carcasses because they cannot open thick skin of larger mammals so usually they have to wait until the carcass is putrid or is opened by mammals. But I doubt they’d have trouble opening a carcass this small so I’m not sure why the vulture just stood there watching the weasel and made no attempt to eat while I was there. Perhaps my presence made it nervous.<\/p>\n

I’m quite sure the weasel was very recently killed because I didn’t see it about a half-hour earlier when I slowly passed the other way on the road.<\/p>\n

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Another favorite pastime of vultures is to stymie my attempts\u00a0at photographing them well at takeoff. This bird (photographed three days ago in the same area as the earlier images)\u00a0was really too close to me for takeoff shots so when it launched in my direction I cut off wings in all but one of over a dozen photos in the burst. I like the curve of the wings, the fanned tail and the intimacy\u00a0provided by the head-on approach at close range.<\/p>\n

Another problem with photographing Turkey Vultures is the typically high contrast between their\u00a0almost black plumage and the rocks, vegetation or soil that may be in the setting and that’s exactly what happened here.\u00a0In this case to get the dark vulture exposed correctly the rocks in the foreground were significantly overexposed and highly distracting in their brightness. So during processing I selectively brought down the exposure of the rocks by using a “levels\u00a0adjustment” in Photoshop – something I don’t often do.<\/p>\n

Very sharp eyes may\u00a0notice a\u00a0small remnant of that adjustment that I wasn’t quite able to get rid of but seeing it with my old eyes requires serious pixel-peeping so it really doesn’t bother me. I much prefer that tiny flaw over the very bright rocks.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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These recent images illustrate three favorite pastimes of Turkey Vultures.<\/p>\n

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