~Vulture~

~Cathartes aura~

To watch this beautiful bird in flight one would
never guess it feeds on carrion, dead things!
It has a wingspan of 6 feet and a weight of just 4-5 lbs.
This is the reason for its amazing soaring ability.
With a light body weight and a huge wing area
they can stay aloft for hours at a time.
And alight only to roost for the night or to enjoy a quick meal.
They find their snacks by the smell of an animal carcass.
Able to detect that odor many hundreds of feet
in the air and up to several miles away.
They are help in there gliding by thermals, currents of hot air
that rise high into the atmosphere during the summer months.
The buzzards will soon be leaving for the winter,
to find warmer weather (thermals) south of the border, in Mexico.
I didn't have many days left to capture my image of one.
So, time was running out on my vulture quest!!!

Enough about him, now on a personal note.
I've been tracking these birds for weeks.
I'm stalking them from bushes and I was hiding in canyons.
Driving my pickup like a bat-out-of-hell
up and down desert roads, dry gullies and cattle tracks.
All in an effort to photograph one of them,
up close and personal, relatively speaking.
I have hundreds (literally) of images of vultures.
None of them suitable, until today's capture.
The reasons for those useless photographs,
the birds were too high, too fast, the wrong angle,
or they decided to come at me right out of the sun.
In addition to those reasons, here are a few more,
wrong focal length or shutter speed, mistaken aperture,
and the proverbial forgot to turn the dang camera on!!!
But today the buzzard gods pooped on me,
that's a good thing, trust me, a very good thing.
This guy, shown here, floated, soared and sailed
right over my head for a good 3 or 4 minutes.
"Look what I can do, aren't I pretty, take my picture."
What a show-off this guy was, a real personality he had.
Thanks a lot, Buzzy, you sure loved the camera today!

And thank you, too, for stopping by and looking!