Well This is New?!

We've been on this property since around 2004 and this is the first time I've seen this!



That's a Black Vulture, which is about the size of a large cat, standing ankle deep in the water at the edge of the pond.

They do cool off by radiating heat from the shallow blood-vessels under the featherless skin of their legs and the thermometer beside me is reading a few tenths over 100 degrees at the moment, (about 3PM July 30 in real time.) but we've had more than our share of 100-plus days around here over the years and I've never seen any of the plentiful vultures down in the pond before.

Usually, when not ghosting along on the air-currents overhead, they are perched high in the trees keeping an eye on me. I figure they're hoping I'll fall to the ground and become carrion. . .
Once when a group of us (Mom, dad, aunt, uncle and me in three different rigs.) were camped in Big Bend NP twenty or thirty vultures picked a single tree above my Uncle's trailer and sat there looking down all hunch-shouldered, naked-headed, and beady-eyed. It made my uncle very nervous!!



Not only did this one stand still long enough for me to get several shots of it, but apparently I wasn't scary enough to stop it from drinking out of the pond either.