Sunday, August 31, 2008

A turkey on Turkey Peak

Turkey Peak Wild TurkeyPhoto by Alex.Tango.Fuego [it's a bad scan, so my apologies for the poor quality...lots of speckles]

I'm in the process of going through five and a half years of images, selecting "the best of the best" for my photography website, which I hope to have live in two weeks or so.

This is a unique photo that I ran across. When my daughter was six or seven years old, we took a "dadder-daughter" trip to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area two hours west of Austin. She called our weekends together "dadder-daughter" time.

Anyway, this turkey, which I assume was wild, was hanging around the parking lot when we arrived for our hike. We hiked around the park for about four hours I suppose, and ultimately ascended to the top of Turkey Peak. It's a craggy pink granite promontory that is a Class 3 walkup [requiring the use of your hands to climb, but no ropes].

This immature turkey accompanied us on the entire hike, staying a few feet behind, or venturing out in front a bit. Sometimes it would take wing and fly, but it always stayed close by as we hiked along the trails. It climbed, hopped and flew to the summit of Turkey Peak right along with us, where this photograph was taken. We ate lunch on the summit, and then the turkey followed us all the way back to the parking lot.

Strange, but true.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't decide if that's cute or sad, Alex! Poor thing probably imprinted on you. Or your daughter.

Or just wanted to go on a hike.

AlexTangoFuego said...

I think it was just hungry, and people had been feeding it in the park or something.

Anonymous said...

And hopefully, you shared some crumbs with it?

Anonymous said...

it looks like it has only one leg