Late on Monday afternoon I spotted this large male Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge as he was foraging in the leaf litter. The turkey was very focused on scratching about in the fallen leaves and let me get so close to him that I was able to take this shot at 250mm on my zoom lens that extends to 600mm.
The light was already starting to fade—the sun set at 4:53 pm that day—and I know that my relatively old DSLR does not handle low light very well, so I did not want to raise the ISO beyond ISO 800, for fear of introducing an unacceptable amount of graininess. Instead, I captured this image with an exposure of 1/40 second, a really slow shutter speed. Even though I was using a monopod for stability, many of my shots were blurry, but this particular image ended up pretty sharp.
I love the way that I was able to capture so many details of the turkey’s feathers. From a distance, the main feathers look to be a solid dark color, but up-close, they show a lot of color variation and patterns. I was happy too that I was able to get a good view of the turkey’s “beard.” I’ve read that you can estimate the age of a turkey on the basis of the length of its beard, but I am not confident that I could figure that out—all I can say is that the turkey appeared to be a mature male to me.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.