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Wild Turkey
Meleagris gallopavo
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This turkey poult (chick) is about 1/4 of its eventual weight - which is to say it's grown pretty big. I've seen them running in the deep grass when they were only 2 inches tall!
One of my most favorite images of the season.
The new 640x640 flickr size has me rewriting a lot of my photoshop actions. The flickr pix are much sharper now :-)
Etymology: From The Straight Dope Meleagris gallopavo is composed of the names of three different birds, none of them the turkey. Meleagris was the ancient Greek name of the Guinea fowl (mentioned above). For hundreds of years, European naturalists believed the turkey was a kind of Guinea fowl, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Gallopavo was one of the early Spanish names for the turkey (often spelled gallipavo). Gallo- comes from gallus, the Latin word for the common barnyard fowl (chicken), Gallus domesticus. And -pavo comes from Latin word for the blue peacock, whose scientific name is Pavo cristatus. The Spanish apparently gave it that name because the bird combined several traits of the two birds. Some later naturalists took the name too literally and assumed the turkey was a hybrid of a peacock and a chicken or of a rooster and a peahen.
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Focal length: 500 mm
fStop: 5.6
ISO: 400
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 sec.
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Cupertino, CA - Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve
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Jun 24, 2010
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