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![\"prairie](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/prairie-falcon-8057-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"prairie")
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\u00a01\/1600, f\/9, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This bird was a mess!\u00a0 It had apparently just finished dining on duck\u00a0so it was wet, blood encrusted and disheveled, with\u00a0tidbits still clinging to feet and beak.\u00a0 The bird is meticulously cleaning and scratching its beak with\u00a0those impressive talons, which seems to me to be about like picking one’s teeth with a Bowie knife.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/9, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n But what I found particularly interesting\u00a0about many of the images I took\u00a0of this bird was the good look at the well-defined and bulging crop.\u00a0\u00a0 The crop is essentially a food storing organ that is an enlarged and muscular part of the esophagus.\u00a0\u00a0One of its advantages is that it\u00a0allows the bird to quickly eat copious amounts of food and then fly off to digest it in peace, rather than have to be concerned about predators on the ground or competing raptors attempting to steal the meal.\u00a0 Most raptors have a crop, although owls do not.\u00a0 Which makes me curious – could the reason for the lack of a crop in owls be the fact that owls typically hunt at night when there’d likely be little, if any,\u00a0competition from the diurnal raptors?\u00a0\u00a0 I\u00a0might have to investigate this a little…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Because I was so close to this bird, a heavy crop of the previous image allows a good look at the falcon “nostril cone”.\u00a0\u00a0 Falcons are incredibly fast flyers.\u00a0 In a stoop (a powered dive to attack prey), the Peregrine Falcon has been clocked at over 200 mph and many other falcon species\u00a0aren’t far behind.\u00a0 At those velocities, air rushing into\u00a0the nostrils would cause breathing problems so falcons have evolved these “cones” at the entrance to their nostrils to disrupt the air flow and slow it down.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Public Domain image, from Wikipedia<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Engineers faced a similar problem when supersonic aircraft were being developed.\u00a0 At those speeds air would rush into the jet engines so fast that proper air flow and air pressure into the compressors and turbines could not be maintained.\u00a0\u00a0 So developers looked at falcons to see how they solved the problem and used the same trick that they do – cone-shaped structures in front of the intakes of the engines to slow the airflow down.<\/p>\n This is the famous Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird in flight over the\u00a0Sierra Mountains.\u00a0 The\u00a0cones can clearly be seen protruding in front of the engine intakes.\u00a0 The positions of these cones\u00a0are adjusted in flight,\u00a0depending on speed.\u00a0 At\u00a0relatively slow speeds,\u00a0as in this photo, the cones protrude far out in front of the\u00a0engine but as supersonic velocities are approached the cones move further back into the engine.<\/p>\n Just another example of humans looking to nature for inspiration\u00a0in solving a practical problem.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two days ago we\u00a0located the Prairie Falcon on the causeway once again.\u00a0 This bird spends most of its time on the island itself but occasionally ventures onto the causeway to hunt ducks.\u00a0 I’m quite sure, as are others who are more falcon knowledgeable than I, that it’s the same\u00a0individual in all of my recent Prairie Falcon posts. Usually I complain about not being able to get close enough to my subjects but here I had the opposite problem.\u00a0 The only way I could even see this bird was from very close.\u00a0 From any further away the\u00a0falcon was completely\u00a0obstructed by the road edge and the vegetation growing there.\u00a0 The first two images are essentially full frame (very little crop) and that’s without my tc attached,\u00a0so the falcon is too tight in the frame but this post is more about\u00a0falcon adaptations than it is about\u00a0aesthetics anyway. \u00a01\/1600, f\/9, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in This bird was a mess!\u00a0 It had apparently just finished dining on duck\u00a0so it was wet, blood encrusted and disheveled, with\u00a0tidbits still clinging to feet and beak.\u00a0 The bird is meticulously cleaning and scratching its beak with\u00a0those impressive talons, which seems to me to be about like picking one’s teeth with a Bowie knife. \u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/9, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in But what I found particularly interesting\u00a0about many of the images I took\u00a0of this bird was the good look at the well-defined and bulging crop.\u00a0\u00a0…<\/p>\n![\"prairie](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/prairie-falcon-8083-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"prairie")
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<\/p>\n![\"Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird\"](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird.jpg\" "\\"Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird\\"")
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