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One day I made a nice bicycletrip to the east of Campo Maior, Portugal, close along the spanish border. Along borders you always find the most remote and abandoned areas since borders have always blocked communications. Which also ment to not build roads.
The camping I stayed at has prepared two cycling routes but they are to my opinion to much into the regular (e-bike ...) world.
I therefor created a more remote alternative in my laptop and loaded that track in my gps.
I even found two offroad tracks, but rather short.
And although this land has an extreme mono-culture (actually only grainfields or olivetrees) there is still a lot to discover.
If you have trained "the eye" to see your brain to Notice.
I turned south and cycled on the "last road" of Portugal.
Suddenly a huge shadow flew over me, and one more, and one more. Vultures 👌, vultures 👌 and more vultures 👌.
They were landing behind the very next tree, so I returned 50 meters and parked the OnTheRoad 4.0 🖱️. I took my Panasonic FZ1000 camera 🖱️ plus the spare battery and walked very slowly towards them. In the meantime they were still flying over me quite low, at maybe 25 to 50 meters height only.
I adjusted the camera and then put it into highspeed burst ("mitrailleur") mode. Which means 7 fullsize pictures per second in AFC (autofocus-continous) mode. So new autofocus with every new picture, based on direction prediction to speed burst up. In AFS (autofocus-single) mode the speed is 12 fps. That are the maximum speeds and depending at the writingspeed of the camera - memorycard combi. I therefor have a 95 Mb/second (writing) highspeed memorycard installed. But still the shooting is faster (bigger) then the saving. After about 50 pictures the buffer starts to become overloaded and the burstspeed slows down.
Just in time I remembered the "Inspector Clouseau course part 1" (and part 13) I joined so long ago 😄. And luck was on my side since the land here was about 2 mts higher then the road so I managed to hide.
I sneaked to the last tree however that tree blocked their view but also mine and I now had to make a decision. I raised, walked around the tree, and then the vultures suddenly noticed me and took off.
Some 5 minutes later I had about 500 pictures of them 😁. I will judge each one of them and will be happy to do so ... The above series is the compilation of this "meet and greet" ✅.
These are griffon vultures, their wingspan is about 230cms to 270cms, they weigh up to 11 kgs and age up to 40 years. So they are a lot more impressive then I am 👌 and the picture is on an estimated 1:1 scale. But I win on weight 😀 since they "only" weigh up to 11 kgs. Birds achive that volume-to-weight ratio by having hollow bones.
The last time I saw vultures this close was in Remuzat in the French Hautes Alpes. But that time I even was above them.
One Hundred more Great Encounter(s) with Nature 🥂
You find the related cyclingblog here 🖱️
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