I drove right by this fella feasting on the side of the road. Whoa!! U-turn time. I positioned my vehicle, on the opposite shoulder of the road, and started photographing across the pavement from the open driver's side window. Despite the cool and bright cloudy conditions, that was a bad mistake as all images were suffering from heat shimmer. Time to go for another u-turn and photograph from the near shoulder through the passenger window. Ah, now that was much better! The vulture was nervous at first, but after about 10 minutes it was fully comfortable with my presence, even letting me slowly get out the passenger side door and go down low and intimately close to the action (sights AND smells). Thank goodness the wind was not strong an generally not towards me. That was fun, and some cool stuff to photograph!
Canon 7DII + 500mm f/4 II + 1.4TC III, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/1250s., f/7.1, ISO 800, natural light, handheld, FF, a few strands of offending grasses removed via clone, patch, and content aware.