I usually file turkey vultures under Not Interesting. We have them at home. They’re everywhere: Parked on the power lines behind my work, perching on your flagpole, slouching around on the ground picking your town’s roadkill clean. Or, most often, a familiar black silhouette against the sky:

What with one thing and another they’re also not the most photogenic bird in the world.

This time, though, I had the rare opportunity to look down on one from above rather than the other way around.

My Canon R10 has a purported subject tracking feature, which struggles quite a bit with birds soaring over some manner of textured terrain, be that ground or trees from above, or over or even on water. I got a couple of halfway decent shots among dozens of useless ones, and tellingly the only ones that were even vaguely acceptable were the ones where I took a punt at focusing manually. Both of these were at the extreme end of my lens’ range, as well.