July Nature Notes (3 of 5)

21 July 2025.   A Vulture’s Visit and the Elk Returns

At 7:00 am in the morning, just before the sun had broken through the morning mist, a turkey vulture flew in and landed on the utility pole just outside my office window.  This is the first time I had seen a vulture do this and I suspect that this is an unusual thing for a vulture to do. 

Because of the weak light, I felt this was a good opportunity to practice obtaining photos of various brightness using my camera’s options for controlling light exposure during image recording, i.e., varying the exposure time using the shutter priority mode and Auto ISO setting.  Wildlife photography puts an emphasis on obtaining sharp pictures when the animal is moving and thus, the need to set a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion.  The use of Auto ISO allows the camera, with its sophisticated light-metering capability and innate built-in intelligence, to select the right light sensitivity of the sensor to obtain the proper exposure in the ambient light situation.  If everything is done right, the result can be a crisp, properly exposed picture.  So, I set up my camera on the porch and took a string of pictures of the vulture with a sequence of increasingly rapid shutter speeds.  Would the Auto ISO compensate for the faster shutter speeds?  (Fig 6, 7)

fig 6

fig 7

Happily, the camera’s Auto ISO enabled me to increase the shutter speed, i.e. shorten the exposure time to 1/1000^th of a second, which may not be fast enough to freeze the wing motion of a hummingbird or even a junco but is more than fast enough to capture stop-motion photos of the wing motion during flight of a big ol turkey vulture and, additionally, to capture crisp, sharp images of the fast moving feet and legs during the fence-clearing leap of a big ol  bull elk.

fig 8

fig 9

As luck would have it, as I turned from giving attention to the vulture and glanced down the recently opened-up sightline over the hay field, lo-and-behold, there was our resident bull elk leisurely grazing in the field.  All the requisite exposure settings had been established from the pictures of the vulture and all I had to do was turn the camera around on the tripod to begin taking pictures of the elk.  (Fig 8, 9)  The pictures with the interchangeable-lens camera are complimented by the numerous pictures of elk, including this same bull as in the preceding pictures, by the trail cameras. (Fig 10)

fig 10