This is a tiring exercise 10/12

White-headed Vulture, Aegypius occipitalis 78-84 cm.
This is a sequence of events, taken in the Kruger National Park in April 2006 between Satara and Lethaba with a D200 and 200-400 F4 G VR lens +1.4X TC on a Wimberley Head on a Cam-steady car window support off the door of my vehicle.
Some cropping
The male was busy eating some kill? or road kill in the top of this dead tree, maybe 10 meters above the ground and quite far from the road. The small size of these large birds gives an indication of the distance – I often wander why one sees these great sightings just outside the reach of you longest lens for really killing photographs?
He was stuffing his face, with the female forgotten in a tree some distance behind him, towards his right side. I took nearly 300 photographs of him eating. It was while I was concentrating on him, that the female flew-in, then flew-up to the male, maybe to get a piece of the tail he was trying to swallow. This was when he took off to the tree next to him, and she landed, looked at the fur in the tree, then set-off towards his tree, where upon he flew back to the first tree, all the while holding on to his price packet. Note the fur flying in most of the pictures.
He swallowed and regurgitated that spine and tail maybe ten times. Eventually, my wife had enough of the action and heat, and we had to leave. In nearly 20 years of visiting this park, this is only the third time that we have seen these vultures and the first time I could lay a lens on them. They are not common, and one seldom see male and female together like here to note the plumage difference between the sexes.
Habitat – thornveld and savannah, solitary bird, rare outside large game reserves.
These pictures have more of an educational value than being really high quality nature photography, but I post it anyway because I feel this is such an unusual sight and that wild and FREE.