Marty’s photo of the day #2186: Back on March 11 and March 12, I posted two photos from my motion-sensing camera: one of a coyote, and one of a fox. Both were checking out a dead deer that was two hundred feet below my house. I thought for sure that I would soon get photos of other mammals, such as wolves or mountain lions. Instead, the frozen deer remained virtually untouched, except for a fox that would occasionally stop by to pee on it.
Still, I patiently kept my camera aimed over the deer. Even after it warmed up enough for the deer to thaw out, no one fed off it. And I had to gag from the smell each time I checked my camera. Finally, in just a matter of a few days, the deer got eaten down to nothing. But it wasn’t a fox, bear, coyote, mountain lion, or any other mammal. Instead it was six industrious vultures. Here’s a photo from one of their feeding sessions.