Winter Clashes With Spring – Seasonal Changes Make Bird Photography Interesting
Winter is clashing with spring right now in northern Utah and those seasonal changes can make bird photography interesting.
Winter is clashing with spring right now in northern Utah and those seasonal changes can make bird photography interesting.
Vultures and condors are scavengers and help to clean up the environment by consuming carrion, road kill and gut piles left from the kills of human and non-human hunters.
I spent time in northern Utah yesterday and I was able to photograph a juvenile Golden Eagle, Turkey Vultures plus a covey of Gray Partridges.
I found an exceptionally obliging Turkey Vulture in Box Elder County warming up in the morning sun.
Two bald headed birds, but very different in appearance, one is a vulture who cleans up the earth and the other a wading bird with pink and carmine plumage.
Turkey Vultures are Nature's clean up crew. They consume road kill and other dead animals and and in doing so they clean up the messy stuff.
When I photographed this Turkey Vulture in Box Elder County last summer it flew from the post it had been perched on and landed a bit further away where it quickly began cleaning its bill
Sure, vultures aren't are handsome as Bald Eagles but they do serve an ecological function of cleaning up carrion so in essence they are nature's recyclers.
A bald red head, dark plumage and a white tipped bill isn't something that most people think of as handsome, regal or even good looking but Turkey Vultures are awesome at what they do.
Last week while photographing in a canyon in the Stansbury Mountains in Tooele County, Utah I spotted this Turkey Vulture roosting in a dead tree in morning light.
I am one of those people who love deserts and the West Desert of Utah is once again beckoning to me. The weather here in Utah is very changeable right now, it can feel like spring one day and the next it still feels like winter but it won't be long before the weather levels out and the west desert will begin to green up.