45 thoughts on “Readers’ wildlife photographs”

    2. Yep Turkey Vulture! I do find them attractive. I’m probably the only one that doesn’t think vultures are ugly. They can’t help their bald little faces and besides it makes them look more like bad ass dinosaurs!

      2. Vultures are some of the most beautiful birds in the air. They are true poetry in motion when aloft; so still, so calm, so efficient. And the plumage! So dark, it’s like they’re a gateway into deep space, if not another dimension.

        b&

        1. Ben I posted my #19 below before reading any of the comments. Thanks to #1 above, I feel vindicated that it is at least a vulture 🙂 But your description is a feeling I share. I love your posts. TY.

          Mike

    3. I don’t know about pretty but they fill a niche and help sanitize the planet. With the number of dead deer that I see locally I’m pretty sure my neighborhood would smell pretty bad without their efforts.

      Not too long ago I saw two of them in dispute over the ownership of a particularly stinky dead skunk – I appreciated their willingness to eat the damned thing and stop it stinking up the road.

    1. I do, but persistence and ridiculously expensive gear are still required. 🙂

        1. And your photos are always lovely. Thanks for continuing to share them. I miss the west (sitting here in Minnesota; I lived in the west for 20 years) and they brighten my day. I love your corner of Idaho (well, the land and critters, anyways! Not so much the politics!)

      2. Stephen, in order to get a look inside the eagles’ nest, would a webcam carried aloft by a tethered bunch of helium-filled party balloons work? 😀

          2. Whoa! That looks like fun, but that might make the parent eagles very angry. You could get strafed!

            (I was thinking about something waaay more low tech, like a *wireless* webcam sending images to your laptop.:))

  4. Love the reflection and symmetry in the second picture! Nice work, Stephen!

  5. I actually think the turkey buzzard (or vulture, if you prefer)is kind of cute. There was a friendly one at a local wildlife center that would follow me as I walked around his cage.

  6. It’s an attractive adaptation to a messy business. And certainly no worse looking than a hairless cat!

    1. I was just thinking vs. a cat, and you hit it! I’d go an order of magnitude better than a hairless cat, and just for parity considerably better than a Chihuahua (but if no other choice I’d take the latter over a hc).

  7. I do find the Golden Purifier attractive. One of my favorite birds since early childhood. A drawing of its skull adorns my website, and my pseudonym “Ironwing” refers to a turkey vulture. A graceful flier with a curious and gentle personality, and fills an essential ecological niche. And that naked head is a great advantage for a bird that lives on rotten meat! Hatching-year birds have black heads.
    Inspection of a road-killed bird taught me that the ridges on the head are actually tough, thickened skin, not wrinkles as you might think, and the bird’s wing feather shafts are as thick as its wing bones.
    I once spoke with a wildlife rehabilitator who had kept a turkey vulture. The bird ate almost anything but was partial to jelly donuts. It would stomp on the donut and eat the jelly that oozed between its toes, then eat the donut.

    1. Cathartes must be one of the most apt generic names ever made. However, I think translating the specific epithet as “golden” is incorrect. “Aura” is “breeze” (which is also apt) while “golden” would be “aurea” (and would not make much sense).

  8. I of course agree with other commenters that it is either a turkey vulture or turkey buzzard. I have over the years seen them on a number of occasions and have always found them to be beautiful when in flight. On the ground I also find them attractive but then beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.

  11. Watching turkey vultures fly is intoxicating to me. The way they circle upwards on the thermals and almost never flap their wings is so distinctive and a sight of great beauty.

    As I kid, I went on a few multi day canoe trips. Feeling like a little dot in a seemingly infinite wilderness was a great experience, but looking up and seeing the vultures circling overhead was always a bit intimidating. My group refered to them as FTV’s. I’ll leave it to your imagination what the ‘F’ stood for.

  12. Cathartes aura is perhaps less “pretty” than Haliaeetus leucocephalus or Recurvirostra americana, but I find them aesthetically superior nonetheless. This is, in part, because they inhabit sublime places. Haliaeetus leucocephalus and Recurvirostris americana evoke damp, mucky realms, likely infested with mosquitoes. Cathartes aura, on the other hand, graces the deserts and semiarid mountains with its presence.

  13. Apologies for the pedantry but the official (American Ornithologists’ Union) name is Turkey Vulture. The word “buzzard” is applied to hawks in various genera (e.g., Buteo, Pernis) in the UK and Europe but is not used officially in North America.

    1. They’re called “turkey” vultures because their heads resemble those of turkeys.

  14. Some time back, I was driving between Mason and Llano, TX. There was a turkey vulture about 100 yards down the road. I could tell from its body language that it was puzzled. I thought that rather remarkable. As I drove by, I saw that it was trying to figure out how to eat a dead porcupine.

  15. I changed my thinking about vultures after reading a book by S. African novelist Deon Meyers discusses the 11 species of vulture native to the country, each of which evolved to clean a specific area of carcass bone. The evolutionary niche vultures and other carrion consumers fill suddenly came into focus for me, and the vulture’s visage no longer seemed so sinister. In fact, I’ve grown to think they look kinda cool. It’s not their fault they don’t have parrot plumage.

    The S. African birds Meyers uses for a plot point are (true fact) killed by poachers who place arsenic in elephant and rhino carcasses so that wildlife protection authorities are delayed in locating kill sites, enabling the getaway. Fear of disease outbreak due to carrion cleaning crew depletion exacerbates the unspeakablly unnecessary assault on life of all these species, ivory producer and birds alike.

    I lived in Boise for 20 years and rode around up in the Wood River valley often. I love the photo’s, even though they make me homesick for Idaho. The state politics are almost as Right as it gets, but my Boise district elected an out lesbian lady to the legislature just before I had to leave in ’05.

    1. Blaine County, where I live, is progressive. All politics is local.

  16. One of the greatest of all vultures is the California condor, which you can see if you visit the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Their heads are less attractive than the turkey vulture, but their wingspan is very impressive as they ride the thermals in and over the Canyon! They are all numbered, as well. Their survival is a great success story of conservation efforts.

    1. You can see captive California Condors and other large raptors at the World Center Birds of Prey, funded by the Peregrine Fund. They do good rehabilitation work, and are worth a visit if you’re in the area.

  17. Turkey vultures (or ‘TuVus’ to use the birder’s shorthand) are definitely cool birds. Around here they share space and prey with black vultures, seemingly without the slightest bit of territoriality – I’ve seen them roosting together. In the air, the turkey vulture can be distinguished by the silvery-grey trailing edges of its wings (as Ironwing noted above) as well as a slight dihedral [V-shape] to the wings in glide. The blacks, on the other hand, glide with wings mostly flat, and have all black feathers – except the shafts of the five primary flight feathers out on the wingtips are white, so the bird has a pale ‘palm print.’ They also, at least in my experience, tend to soar much higher than the turkeys.

    After a cool, humid night, both species can sometimes be seen in treetops or on poles, wings draped loosely outwards like a scarecrow, warming up and drying off.

    The vomit defense, as noted in the cartoon Ivarhusa linked to, is all too true, and it is as foul as you imagine, likely even more so. When I worked as a raptor rehabilitator, an injured TuVu was brought in, and while we had it on the exam table it began that familiar motion. I managed to slide across the trash can with my foot (my hands restraining the bird) and successfully aimed the defensive vomit in that direction, but it still meant two assistants and two volunteers watching the exam immediately vacated the small room, leaving me alone with the bird – not what you should do, but I sympathized through watering eyes.

    As far as raptors go, vultures handle rehab well, but the bald truth is, most of the raptors we saw were in too rough shape to save. Stands to reason, because if you can get ahold of any bird, chances are it’s not in good condition. Watching a successful release dwindle into the distance, after a few weeks of care, is pretty damn rewarding though.

  18. I think he looks cute in an ugly kind of way. The water birds are beautiful.

  19. I always love these wildlife pictures. My most immediate thought is regarding the last picture. Its probably not “his best side”. I can not identify the bird nor am I qualified to do so. I would only guess from a less than amateur experience level that it is probably some kind of vulture or other carrion consumer. But my most strong feeling is that if you happen to see that bird in flight, I am overwhelmingly confident that it will be stunningly beautiful (at least to me).

  20. The Zoroastrians and Parsees in India put dead bodies in Dakhma’s or Towers of Silence where the corpses are consumed by vultures. A very clean and appropriate way to dispose of the dead. Sadly the Zoroastrians in Iran are no longer allowed to use this method and the Parsees are finding that the population of vultures has declined owing to poisoning.

    1. I saw part of an Attenborough program the other night where he mentioned that the vultures seem to be recovering well after the crash.

  22. I photographed a pair of black vultures a couple of weeks ago. One seemingly signaled the other over with a right wing flair. The other jumped over to the right side of the caller and they begain simultaneously grooming each other. Very cool to see vultures bonding like that. Unfortunately the photos were taken by an amature with a faulty lens so they arent quite the quality we are used to seeing here.

Comments are closed.