When is a vulture not a vulture

Palmnut Vulture, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

I’m afraid, for once, there isn’t a punchline – the fact is the Palmnut Vulture, today’s photo, is more of an eagle than it is a vulture and despite it’s ferocious looking bill and sharp talons it prefers to eat… wait for it…oh, you guessed – Palmnut, how did you know? Oh yes, the name, it was pretty obvious now I come to think of it. So, we have a vulture that isn’t really a vulture and prefers seeds to sinew – talk about a mixed up bird. With the exception of it’s head, the bird more resembles one of the fishing eagles such as the African Fishing Eagle or even the might Stellar’s Sea Eagle and whilst they’re not directly related, the Palmnut Vulture is to be found next to stretches of water where they will eat crabs, mollusc and fish. Told you it was a mixed up bird.

This weekend won’t see much of my traditional photography, though the camera will be making an outing or two; as per usual, I’ll be out taking pictures for the kids football team tomorrow morning. As mentioned, the club use the photos to produce a year book as well as weekly newsheets (in email format of course) but there in lies a problem. The issue with having large memory cards is finding large enough media to fit it on and when the camera can fit two large memory cards, well you can do the maths (as they say). Currently in the 1D4 I have a 16Gb SD card and an 8Gb Compactflash card, 24Gb without drawing breath – that’s the equivalent of 6 DVDs worth of images. Of course the answer to the transfer issue is the humble USB memory stick; having had computers since around 1990, I’ve seen some transitions especially when it comes to storage. My first PC had a whopping 100Mb hard drive – and that was considered huge at the time; the first memory card I bought was a 64Mb Smartmedia and cost me over £100, you can pick up a 4Gb memory card for the price of two pints of beer (or just over a Gallon of petrol/gas in the UK). I’m still rather bemused that I can carry around a device in my pocket that hold 3000 photos – imagine trying to do that with Slides!

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