Tag: male

Northern Harrier Male in Flight

Just a single image of a male Northern Harrier in flight but this shot means a lot to me.    Canon 7D, 1/6400, f/5.6, ISO 640, EV – 0.o, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc I have many nice harrier images taken during winter around the marshes of the Great Salt Lake but for me this species has been a nemesis bird during spring and summer.  Most of our harriers migrate north in early spring and those that stick around become very difficult to approach.  For three summers now I’ve been trying mightily to get a decent flight shot of a harrier to no avail.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done some crazy driving (I’m usually shooting from my truck) trying to intersect the flight path of one of these birds only to have it veer off before it got close.  As Mia often says – these birds like to “yank my chains”.   Then, about three weeks ago, this male apparently forgot to “yank” and flew relatively close to me.  I rattled off a burst and got this one image that I like.  My techs for the image weren’t ideal but it still worked out and I’m delighted.  I guess it doesn’t take much to satisfy this  bird photographer sometimes… This post will be a bit of an experiment.  I’ll be out of town for a couple of days so I’m preparing the post now and will test the delayed posting feature of WordPress.  Hope it works. Ron      

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White-crowned Sparrow Bathing in a Lilac Bush

 I have a serious case of unrequited spring fever.  It’s been a long and dreary winter and it’s not over yet so when I stumbled across these images from last spring a few days ago I decided they were worthy of a post.   Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2500, f/8, ISO 640 It was just after a spring rain in May last year when the sun came out and I noticed this male White-crowned Sparrow fluttering around in my neighbor’s lilac bush so I quickly grabbed my gear and started firing away.      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/3200, f/8, ISO 640 The sparrow seemed so ecstatic over his bath that he let me get close and pretty much ignored me.      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2500, f/8, ISO 640 The leaves and especially the flowers were loaded with water and the sparrow was taking full advantage of the situation.      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2000, f/8, ISO 640 And the ecstasy continues.  I guess there’s just something special about bathing in lilac water…      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2000, f/8, ISO 640      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2000, f/8, ISO 640      Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2500, f/8, ISO 640     Canon 7D, 1.4 tc,  tripod, 1/2500, f/8, ISO 640 Some of these photos are far from perfect – the light was harsh, the bird was side-lit, I often didn’t get a catch light in the eye and the contrast was high, especially…

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Horned Larks Blowin’ in the Wind

 I have particularly fond memories of Horned Larks from growing up on our northwestern Montana family farm near Cut Bank, Montana.  The fallow barley fields and adjacent short grass prairies abounded with them.  But since I began photographing birds I’ve had very few opportunities with them here in Utah – until last week when had a grand time with multiple cooperative larks in the foothills of the Stansbury Mountains.   And yes, the wind was blowing briskly – a perfect situation to remind me of those Montana larks!    Singing in the wind The  wind seemed to inspire the males to sing as they all seemed to be singing up a storm on this day, despite the early February date.      Blown off the perch While it may look like this male is taking flight, in reality it was being blown off the perch by a sudden gust of wind.  If it had been taking off, both wings would be extended.       Wind- disheveled  feathers  In this photo, the wind updraft from the rock perch blew a perfect semicircle of his upper chest feathers into his black neck ring, making him look pretty silly.      Very obvious “horns” This photo shows the “horns” (occipital feather tufts) that are characteristic of the species.  The horns are found on both sexes but they are much less obvious in the female and rarely erected.  This frontal view of the head shows the horns most distinctly when they are raised.     Horns laying almost flat At times the horns are laid flat against the…

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Handedness in Short-eared Owls

Last summer Mia and I spent four days photographing a family of Short-eared Owls in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.  There were two baby owls in a nest under a sagebrush guarded over constantly by the female while the male hunted and brought in food.   That food in every instance that we saw was a vole (mouse-like rodent).  Many of the photos I took were of the male in flight, returning to the area of the nest with a vole in his talons. Male with vole It wasn’t until I returned home and began processing the images that I began to notice that the male always seemed to carry the vole in its left foot.  This piqued my curiosity about something I’d never considered – do some birds show “handedness” – the preference of using one limb as opposed to the other?  Could this male owl, or perhaps all Short-eared Owls, be left-“handed”?   Once again, carrying the vole in the left foot So I decided to do an inventory of my images of these birds to see what would turn up.  After culling my photos of these owls from this trip I had 271 photos to go through.  Most of those were flight shots of the male and in more than half of them he was carrying a vole.  My goal was to try to determine how many “sorties” he made with a vole that I had photographed (I often got multiple shots of the male with the same vole in the same sortie) and determine what percentage of the time he…

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