maryanne: Thanks. Its amazing but I took both photos from my deck. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to aim the camera effectively yet. Both birds flew directly over me and were sailing. The back of my house and deck face a valley with a creek at the bottom about 100 feet or so below the house. The land on other side of the creek rises more slowly to about the same height of my house. The large raptors catch the breeze coming up the hills and they really seem to enjoy it. The vultures are very simple to identify (if I can identify them, anyone can). As you can see, the turkey vulture appears to have a white bottom from tip to tip around the back of its wing. It is large--about 6' across. The black vulture has white only on the tips of its wings and is only about 5' across. Up close the turkey has a red head and the black has a grey head. I've found that the turkey vultures will come down to check me out when I am outside working. They just fly above me about 30' up or so. They will also fly through the woods (when leaves are off the trees) cutting a trail in and out of the trees. I have no idea why they do this since it appears a bit dangerous for a 6' bird. Its almost as if the turkey vultures want to show off. The black vulutres do not do this. They seem more aloof. The read tailed hawk was also enjoying a sail without flapping. That is why I think its tail was completely opened. It was just above me and I couldn't focus on it so I just clicked the camera and looked and there it was--just dumb luck. Last week, I heard what sounded like a death scream in the front yard. I looked up and it was 3 of these hawks making passes at each other. The bald eagles are less common than the hawks here. However, they do land in the trees in back of my house. From the top of the trees, they can survey their kingdom. With some luck, I should get a chance at an image within 100 feet or so.

I love cooking, and I especially like cooking for the holidays. And I like to cook lots of unusual foods. A few years back, my sister and I decided to prepare a "non-traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner"! Oh that was a mistake with our family. We had all these leftovers that no one would eat. Since then we make our traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner (our version), but then on Christmas we vary our menus! Makes everyone happy that way. A few years back, I was doing reserch for an article I wrote "TURKEY DAY FOODS & HERBSOLD AND NEW". I found the research to be very interesting. If you are interested here are some facts that I discovered. "With few supplies, cold, sick and slowly starving to death, less than half of the original Pilgrims managed to survive the first winter of 1620-1621. However, with the help of the Wampanoag, the remaining Pilgrims had a bountiful 1621 fall harvest. Sometime between September 21 and November 11, 1621, the 52 Pilgrims shared their bounty with the 90 Wampanoag at a three-day harvest feast, now known as Thanksgiving. Items most likely on the menu included the following:  CORNBREAD: admired by both the English and Native Americans  ENGLISH CHEESE PIE: cheese was important to the English  VENISON: five deer were brought by the Native Americans  DUCKS & GEESE: gathered by the English  WILD TURKEY: Native Americans and English alike enjoyed this meal  STUFFING: with herbs, onions and/or oats  GARLIC AND ONIONS: staples of the diet  PUMPKIN PUDDING: there wasn't pumpkin pie at the time  INDIAN PUDDING: can be served as a warm or cold dessert  FISH: cod, bass, herring, shad, bluefish, and lots of eel.  SEAFOOD: clams, lobsters, mussels, and very small quantities of oysters  BIRDS: wild turkey, goose, duck, crane, swan, partridge, and other miscellaneous waterfowl; they were also known to have occasionally eaten eagles (which "tasted like mutton" according to Winslow in 1623.)  OTHER MEAT: venison (deer), possibly some salt pork or chicken.  GRAIN: wheat flour, Indian corn and corn meal; barley (mainly for beer-making).  FRUITS: raspberries, strawberries, grapes, plums, cherries, blueberries, gooseberries (these would have been dried, as none would have been in season).  VEGETABLES: small quantity of peas, squashes (including pumpkins), beans  NUTS: walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, hickory nuts, ground nuts  HERBS and SEASONINGS: wild onions and garlic, leeks, strawberry leaves, currants, sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brooklime, liverwort, watercress, and flax; from England they brought seeds and probably planted radishes, lettuce, carrots, onions, and cabbage. Salt was available on the table, but pepper was used only during cooking. Olive oil in small quantities may have been brought over, although the Pilgrims had to sell most of their oil and butter before sailing, in order to stay on budget.  OTHER: maple syrup, honey; small quantities of butter, Holland cheese, and eggs." So we can always vary our Thanksgiving Day menu with some of the above foods.

first note, the sun was almost directly overhead and I was looking up at the bird (sun was behind me at a few degrees off top and the bird was at about 70 degrees which means he would be somewhat shadowed. I really tried to ID the bird. I looked closely at its head, flight feathers, tail, It looked like a Turkey Vulture except I didn't see any white and it looked like it had a head about the same color as the body... At the Chattanooga nature center, they have two red tails that are not releaseable and in a cage (way too small if you ask me) The biggest one is only a bit smaller than the Eagle in the next cage (much bigger cage) and it (red tail) had no white that I could see. it is an old bird and it has light feathers but no white. After seeing that captive red tail, I tend to agree that the big bird I saw was a red tail. one thing for sure, if its a red tail, its not going too far away and I should get the chance to see it again. Here is a link that might be useful: Photos from the edge, of Tennessee

Oh my goodness, 8 likes! (I thought I'd do it if there were 5 or more..) There's not a lot to it, but don't read it if you're squeamish. Newly married, my now ex and I were at Agra Fort on the Yamuna river, taking time out to view the Taj Mahal several miles downstream, where it appeared to hover on the distant riverbank like an impossibly lovely white waterbird. We'd already visited it the day before, staying from mid-morning to closing time to gaze in fascination at its ever-changing shades of white as the sun moved round, to admire the magnificent marble work from elaborately carved perforated screens to exquisitely detailed, naturalistic relief carvings of flowers, and to observe the interesting optical illusion in the design of the minarets we'd been told about, which I'd wanted to see for myself. So after viewing the Fort, we'd wandered down to the riverbank to take in yet another view of the Taj, with a tragic love story in mind. After the untimely death of his beloved wife, the grief-stricken Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan had commissioned the building, the artistic masterpiece of his reign, to house her tomb, and as an eternal monument to her beauty of body and spirit. But, before long he would be prevented from visiting her there, when his usurping son saw fit to ensure his hold on power by imprisoning his father for life at Agra Fort. For the rest of his life, the still grieving Shah Jahan could only gaze from afar, every day from his cell window, at his dear wife's wonderful tomb by the river. Entranced with the beauty and the romantic history, I gazed out across the sluggish river and was surprised to see a large vulture silhouetted against the setting sun, floating slowly downstream, perched aboard a shiny black log-shaped floating platform. As I watched, he appeared to be picking and pulling at something near his feet, eventually hoisting up a quantity of black rubber tubing. As he feasted, my eyes adjusted; the floating log became distinctly less log-like and... with a shock, revealed itself to be a blackened human corpse, whose intestines he'd been busily removing... I learnt later that they burn the dead at sacred sites further upriver, and sometimes apparently the corpses, or bits of them, can end up, half-burned, floating in the river. (I hope that is what happened, better than if some unfortunate lonely traveller had fallen in and drowned. Or the body of an anonymous beggar no-one cared about was disposed of into the river with the garbage, without a funeral rite...) It's a striking aspect of India; its capacity to veer suddenly from transcendental beauty one moment to abject horror, at least to Western eyes, the next. And its people's apparent ability to accept and embrace that whole spectrum of life's highs and lows with remarkable equanimity and cheerfulness. Unless they're cocooned away from it all in their international 5-star hotels, Western visitors to India seem to either love the place passionately or hate it and can't wait to get away. I confess to being one of the former.