Flight of the Vulture, Fall of the Fool

By George on

 

In the sprawling grasslands of Blue Springs, Missouri, on a dew-slicked Tuesday morning, local Olympus enthusiast Carl “Shutter-Fingers” McGraw spotted the Holy Grail of Missouri wildlife photography: a full-grown turkey vulture, wings outstretched, gliding low over the park like a feathered hang-glider that had seen some stuff.

Carl, a retired mailman turned amateur nature documentarian (and self-declared “avian paparazzi”), was armed with his trusty Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II and a telephoto lens roughly the length of a baseball bat. He had just finished watching a 3-hour YouTube video titled "Zen and the Art of Wildlife Photography" and was feeling spiritually and optically aligned.

The moment the vulture crested the hill, Carl dropped his breakfast granola bar, screamed “ACTION!” (despite this being real life, not a film set), and took off running across the field.

Now, if you’ve never seen a 62-year-old man with a camera the weight of a brick sprinting through wet grass in Crocs, you’ve missed a spectacle that lies somewhere between a nature documentary and a slapstick comedy from 1932.

Carl ran like a gazelle if the gazelle had one bad knee, no sense of direction, and a lens cap still on.

The vulture, sensing either danger or a deeply confused fan, banked left. Carl followed. The bird banked right. Carl followed. The bird went vertical. Carl... did not.

Instead, he tripped on an aggressively placed molehill, flew five feet horizontally, and crash-landed flat on his back like a turtle that had committed to a trust fall with Mother Earth.

As he lay in the grass, staring up at the sky and hearing the distant cackling of the turkey vulture—who seemed to be enjoying the show—Carl slowly lifted his Olympus and clicked one blurry photo of a cloud that maybe looked like a bird if you squinted and spun around twice.

When the park ranger showed up to help him off the ground, Carl simply smiled, camera in hand, and said:

“Next time, I’ll let the bird do the flying. My job’s to zoom, not to zoom.”

Location: Missouri, USA

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