Tag: bulging crop
Prairie Falcon – Bloody, Wet And Stuffed To The Gills
American Kestrel With Vole Prey – The Rest Of The Story
It’ll take 16 more images to tell the rest of the story that I started yesterday but I thought it was worth telling.
Red-tailed Hawk – Do My Photos Sometimes Misrepresent Reality?
Prairie Falcon – Satiated And Cleaning Up After A Big Meal
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a wild raptor with a more obviously bulging crop than this Prairie Falcon.
A Gluttonous Red-tailed Hawk
When food is plentiful raptors take advantage of the situation. Tomorrow things might be different.
Two Recent Swainson’s Hawks
So far this year Swainson’s Hawk populations seem to be a little spotty. I’m finding them in normal concentrations in some areas but in others where there’s been good numbers of them in the past they seem to be rare or nonexistent. I’m not really alarmed about it, rather I suspect this is just one more example of localized bird numbers being difficult to predict.
Peregrine Falcon Feeding Behavior (graphic)
The Peregrine Falcon has always been a nemesis bird for me. I’ve occasionally seen them far off, either in flight or perched, but have never been able to get close to one. All that changed last week when I spent an incredible half hour very close to a young bird while it was feeding on a female Northern Shoveler. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was no LIGHT! DAMMITALL! It was heavily overcast with only a bright spot in the clouds to mark the position of the sun. As usual, this kind of situation requires lots of compromises between shutter speed, ISO, depth of field, motion blur, catch lights, ad infinitum… So compromise I did but I still got many feeding behavior images I find interesting. And since one of the primary focuses of this blog is bird behaviors, you guessed it – a blog post… First – a warning. Some of these photos are graphic. Proceed with caution if your sensitivities are fragile. 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc As I first approached this falcon it was depluming the duck. At times feathers were flying everywhere but at these shutter speeds and apertures many of those shots ended up in the delete bin. At this point I was still using the 1.4 teleconverter but the bird soon let me approach close enough that I was able to ditch the tc and get slightly more shutter speed. Take visual note of the size of the crop in this image when the falcon has just begun…
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Prairie Falcon – Bloody, Wet And Stuffed To The Gills
American Kestrel With Vole Prey – The Rest Of The Story
It’ll take 16 more images to tell the rest of the story that I started yesterday but I thought it was worth telling.
Red-tailed Hawk – Do My Photos Sometimes Misrepresent Reality?
Prairie Falcon – Satiated And Cleaning Up After A Big Meal
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a wild raptor with a more obviously bulging crop than this Prairie Falcon.
A Gluttonous Red-tailed Hawk
When food is plentiful raptors take advantage of the situation. Tomorrow things might be different.
Two Recent Swainson’s Hawks
So far this year Swainson’s Hawk populations seem to be a little spotty. I’m finding them in normal concentrations in some areas but in others where there’s been good numbers of them in the past they seem to be rare or nonexistent. I’m not really alarmed about it, rather I suspect this is just one more example of localized bird numbers being difficult to predict.
Peregrine Falcon Feeding Behavior (graphic)
The Peregrine Falcon has always been a nemesis bird for me. I’ve occasionally seen them far off, either in flight or perched, but have never been able to get close to one. All that changed last week when I spent an incredible half hour very close to a young bird while it was feeding on a female Northern Shoveler. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was no LIGHT! DAMMITALL! It was heavily overcast with only a bright spot in the clouds to mark the position of the sun. As usual, this kind of situation requires lots of compromises between shutter speed, ISO, depth of field, motion blur, catch lights, ad infinitum… So compromise I did but I still got many feeding behavior images I find interesting. And since one of the primary focuses of this blog is bird behaviors, you guessed it – a blog post… First – a warning. Some of these photos are graphic. Proceed with caution if your sensitivities are fragile. 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc As I first approached this falcon it was depluming the duck. At times feathers were flying everywhere but at these shutter speeds and apertures many of those shots ended up in the delete bin. At this point I was still using the 1.4 teleconverter but the bird soon let me approach close enough that I was able to ditch the tc and get slightly more shutter speed. Take visual note of the size of the crop in this image when the falcon has just begun…