Birds American Bald Eagle Eating (explicit content)

gryphon1911

Hall of Famer
Location
Central Ohio, USA
Name
Andrew
WARNING - Images below of the circle of life in the wilderness. Images below may not be for everyone. They are of an eagle eating on a deer carcass. Please click back on the browser now if this is not something you wish to see.


















I know that the white balance is off between some images. Processed from RAW in Lightroom and I was tinkering with the WB. Not sure which I like better. The more saturated ones are what the Fuji camera picked for the WB. The more muted ones is what Lightroom picked for the WB and is actually more true to the scene.

Back story. All the credit for this find goes to my wife. We were on an adventure day, visiting some places about 40 minutes south of our home town. We found an awesome cemetery and just had fun in each others company.
All weekend, my wife was telling me that she had a "feeling" about a park that was only a few miles away from our house. American Bald Eagles had nested there and she thought that we would take a chance and go see if they were in the next.

On the access road to the park, there are a few farms before the park entrance. As we were coming down to a stop sign, we saw a few cars stopped on the road. This is not the safest thing in the world to do as there is really no shoulder. So as we approached the cars, I threw the hazards on and looked to see why everyone was stopping.

Saw this:

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Based on what I knew I was going to shoot, I brought the Fuji XT3 and the Fuji 16-80 and 50-230. So I needed to really push the limits of the lens. Shot wide open, cropped extremely heavily in post and I used Topaz Sharpen AI to work on the RAW.

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05-02-2021_lancaster_XT031580-sharpen-softness.jpg
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Seems the Eagle got there before the turkey vultures did. The vultures were circling above, but for the brief moment I was there, the Eagle had sole run on the carcass.
It is not uncommon for deer to get struck by cars here. Sometimes they are not dispatched immediately and they run for a few yards before collapsing. We believe this to be the most likely scenario here.
 
Lol, things die, other things eat them to live. Between Ohio and Pennsylvania, there are so many deer that the roads are littered each year with roadkill.

In my lifetime, I’ve been personally inside a vehicle that has struck deer on 10 different occasions.

Last time I hit a deer, the body shop wanted to know if there was someone else that could outsource to clean the engine of the entrails, it was so horrific.

oh the story I could tell about that incident!!
 
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