Turkey Vultures

I have something amazing for you today! I happened to find several turkey vultures on my most recent hiking trip. I don't know exactly how many there were, but there were at least three in this tree, and at least that many in the air. These are huge birds; the biggest I've ever seen, by far. A turkey vulture's wingspan is about six feet/1.8 meters!

I happened to be trying to get pictures of some of these birds in the air when I saw these three, yes three, in this tree! The problem was that I hit a wrong button on my camera, and it began a picture slide show. I couldn't get it out of that as much as I tried. I finally had to shut it off and turn it back on. All of this while these gigantic birds were flying around me!

Even with my camera problems, I still got a lot of good stuff for you. I have this big bird on video! So for this episode of Rat TV, I have a good view of this turkey vulture resting in this tree. It begins to become restless, and stretches and yawns, getting ready to fly. I never knew birds yawned!

After stretching and loosening up from its rest. this big turkey vulture leaps into the air and flies away. Actually it flew over the tree and back around to where I was, but I didn't get that part in the video.

If you look closely at this second picture, you can see a second turkey vulture to the left and a little higher than the obvious one. Both of them have their wings stretched out wide. These birds looked every bit their huge size from where I was standing.

Now you can see all three in this picture! I kept the camera zoomed in as much as I could while still keeping it back far enough to have decent picture quality. It was really hard to judge how far to go with it, because this is not something I see every day.

I thought about moving closer, but I really wasn't too eager to bother the biggest birds I've ever seen. I don't know that they would attack me or anything else, but I still didn't feel like messing with something this big. They're vultures, which means that they're scavenger birds. They like their meat already dead.

In this one they seem to be talking to each other. I wonder what the one on the right was saying to the one on the left. "Hey, let's fly over and scare the crap out of that idiot with the camera. Heh heh heh."

Looking a little closer, you can see that turkey vultures are an odd combination of very beautiful and very ugly. Those faces really don't seem to match the bodies. If you want to see what a dinosaur might look like, this might be it.

Click on any of these pictures to get a better look at the birds. This one really shows what an ugly face these birds have. But I guess they wouldn't think of themselves as ugly. I'm sure those bald red heads have a very useful purpose.

I included this last picture because this is a classic pose for a vulture. And I wanted to make sure I gave you as many different views of this bird as I could. I have many more pictures, but these represent them all well. And the video gives you a good idea of what happened. They all flew out of the tree one by one.

I never thought I'd see birds like these, but I now think I'll be seeing more, maybe even this year. I've been hearing that they have been seen very close to my house. And I happened to see what looked like a pterodactyl flying over the road where I was driving this morning. Actually, that was most likely that great blue heron I showed you yesterday, but I expect more of these giant monster birds very soon.

Nature Center Magazine - Copas will be bringing us the state of Connecticut today to travel through. Go take a look. I'm planning some changes to NC-Mag in the days to come, which should make it even better than before. Always evolving and improving.