{"id":100972,"date":"2021-08-03T05:43:28","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T11:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=100972"},"modified":"2021-08-03T05:53:18","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T11:53:18","slug":"preening-yellow-warbler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/03\/preening-yellow-warbler\/","title":{"rendered":"Preening Yellow Warbler"},"content":{"rendered":"

And a lesson in paying attention to detail in my images.<\/p>\n

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Eight days ago in the mountains I took hundreds of photos of this male Yellow Warbler as he was preening after a recent bath. He wasn’t dripping wet but both his appearance and his behavior strongly suggested he’d bathed recently and there was water very close by.<\/p>\n

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Here he was rubbing his face on the branch he was perched on.<\/p>\n

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It was frustrating to take so many photos of interesting behavior and have most of them with his eye either closed, or hidden by feathers or his wing, or have no light in his eye. In this photo and the next one I just…<\/p>\n

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got lucky.<\/p>\n

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In some of the photos his remaining dampness was a little more evident than in others.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s attending to his… nether parts. Besides being a cute photo, it shows off his flexibility.<\/p>\n

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This is one of the best photos I’ve ever taken to document how birds ‘re-zip’ the hooks holding their barbs and barbules together after they’ve been separated by the rigors of being a bird. Here he’s drawing the length of one of his flight feathers through his bill, effectively re-zipping the microscopic hooks. The process has turned that part of that feather 90\u00b0 compared to the other flight feathers.<\/p>\n

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Usually I pride myself on noticing detail in my own images but this time I failed completely, for eight long days. I took hundreds of photos of this bird preening but it wasn’t until last night, while I was choosing photos for this post, that I became curious about something. Why did none of my many photos show him preening his tail? Preening birds usually spend a lot of time working on their tails but I didn’t have a single photo showing him doing so.<\/p>\n

It was only then that I noticed that his tail always appeared ‘thin’ and never spread out, even in some poor quality shots where he was taking off. But in most of my photos of him on this perch I didn’t have enough depth of field to get his tail sharp so I could have a good look at it and see good detail.<\/p>\n

So I went looking for other photos of him on different perches that allowed a better look at his tail.<\/p>\n

..<\/p>\n

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And I found one. Poor guy, he only had a single tail feather. He was molting, big time.<\/p>\n

It was only then that I went back and looked at other photos that might show evidence of molt elsewhere that I had missed. That evidence was everywhere, including…<\/p>\n

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this tight crop of photo #4 above that clearly shows new wing feathers emerging from their shafts. These emerging feathers can be seen in most of the photos I’ve included in today’s post but I’d missed noticing them, probably partly because his feathers were fluffed up during preening so evidence of molt was a little harder to see.<\/p>\n

But not that<\/em> hard. I should have noticed earlier. Like eight days earlier.<\/p>\n

Lesson learned, I hope.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And a lesson in paying attention to detail in my images.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[393,6,334,3486],"tags":[5879,1579,5877,5876,5878,2589,311,2588],"class_list":["post-100972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-yellow-warbler","tag-feathers-emerging-from-their-shafts","tag-molting","tag-nether-parts","tag-paying-attention-to-detail","tag-re-zipping-hooks-during-preening","tag-setophaga-petechia","tag-utah-2","tag-yellow-warbler"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/yellow-warbler-0326-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-qgA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100972"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101008,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100972\/revisions\/101008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}