NATURE CLICKS #477 - WILD TURKEY

A gang of Wild Turkeys, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND, September 2020

I guess you saw that coming, Wild Turkeys in my blog right at Thanksgiving holiday here in the US 😉. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota is a good place to watch them. Quite often they show up near the road and most pictures can be made from the car, which serves as a mobile blind in this matter. We saw a number of large families, which shouldn’t be a surprise knowing that a nest usually has 10 to 15 eggs, sometimes even more.

Thanksgiving might be a little different for many of us this year but I hope you still can enjoy it. If nothing else, go out with your camera and come back with some good pictures!

TURKEY DAY

Happy Thanksgiving to all friends and readers of my blog here in the United States! I’m sure I didn’t think about this holiday when I made this photo in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota last month. It may not be Wild Turkey, but a farm raised one, that will be served traditionally for dinner in many families on Thanksgiving. However, I thought the picture is appropriate for todays holiday blog post. 😊

We have turkeys in the woods around our house. In spring, during their mating season, we can hear them calling every morning but I still have not managed to make a decent photo yet. Up in South and North Dakota we had several opportunities to see Wild Turkeys and even to get close to these shy birds. Most of the time you see them down in the grass with a close and very busy looking background. More than a dozen turkeys had just crossed the road and continued foraging on a small ridge before they finally disappeared in the valley behind. It is the far away and out of focus background that makes the big difference between many previous shots and this one, which became my new favorite instantly…