As seen on Skyline Drive: Wild Turkeys

This Saturday I took a little cruise on Skyline Drive to check out a new hike near Big Meadows.  On my way back, I encountered one of those little traffic jams that means some kind of wildlife has been spotted in the woods.  Maybe I'm a bit cynical about this now - the random stops on that road are quite dangerous, and most of the time people have stopped to look at a deer, so now that I've hit one and had a $2,000 car repair because of it I just don't appreciate the scenic wonder in the same way the rest of my (probably) Northern Virginia fellow travelers do.

However, what was crossing Skyline Drive the other night was out of the ordinary - a flock of about two dozen turkeys!  I've seen them in ones and twos before, but never so many at one time.  It was fascinating, and got me thinking about...well, white meat or dark meat - these hens were about as big as Canada geese.  I managed to snap off two quick photos, but one (the one I am not publishing, of course) didn't have a single bird in it...here you can see quite a few of them.

I remembered that I had a photo stored of a yearling cub I had seen back in June in nearly the same place, so I uploaded it and will share it now.  It's in the woods here foraging, probably only 30 feet or so from the roadway.

I saw one on my hike the other day, too.  It scampered across the trail 50 feet or so ahead of me - it saw and heard me coming, and it ran for a couple of hundred yards before it dissappeared into the woods.  By the way, my friend Evan took the time to put up a few posts about black bears on his blog - including how to increase your chances of seeing one, and suggestions for what to do if you do see one.  Click on this link and look for the posts on black bears:  http://wildlifeinphotography.com/species/.

Although the hike was good exercise, I had to break my attempt short.  More on that next post.