A Half-dozen Vultures

We spent the day at Cypress Gardens, about 40 minutes north of Charleston. It's a county park, in an extensive swampy area dominated by cypresses--it's just gorgeous. The day was also lovely, quite chilly but very sunny. We took a 45-minute boat tour, just the two of us quietly propelled by our guide's paddle.

On the trail around the swamp we came across as many as 100 vultures high in the cypresses in an area where they had perched late in the day. A majority seemed to be turkey vultures, and the rest were black vultures. In this image there are three Turkey Vultures (with red on their heads) and three Black Vultures--entirely black and grey. In our experience, we had hardly (if ever) seen these two species together at all. Don't miss seeing them large--they'll be thinking about flying down on you :)

Edit: an email noted that in the right-most turkey vulture "you can see an unusual family trait, the "perforate nostril," with no septum (divider) between the two nostrils (the blue sky shows through)".

BTW, I have linked to Cornell for the turkey vulture and Wikipedia for the black vulture--thus you can compare the two. That may assist regular blip friends in following up on the birds I blip :)

Here's the Wiki page on Cypress Gardens--more directly informative than the official site. I've marked the map, very roughly.