{"id":101860,"date":"2021-09-01T06:20:36","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T12:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=101860"},"modified":"2021-09-01T07:06:55","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T13:06:55","slug":"hummingbird-wars-and-sphinx-moths-at-the-bee-plant-patch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/01\/hummingbird-wars-and-sphinx-moths-at-the-bee-plant-patch\/","title":{"rendered":"Hummingbird Wars And Sphinx Moths At The Bee Plant Patch"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally found some birds yesterday, with a few White-lined Sphinx Moths thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n

Birds have been slow for me lately, to the point that two days ago in the mountains I was completely bird-skunked. I didn’t even download the few photos I took that day from my memory card. Yesterday morning I needed to visit Antelope Island for a reason unrelated to bird photography so despite the wildfire smoke I took my camera gear along just in case I found an interesting bird or critter.<\/p>\n

The smoke was terrible, worse than I’ve ever seen it on the island. But I did find some very aggressive Rufous Hummingbirds and some sphinx moths (hummingbird moths) on one of the patches of Rocky Mountain Bee Plant. I’ll save my photos of hummers feeding on bee plant flowers for another day but this morning I thought I’d share some photos of them battling with each other and a couple of shots of the sphinx moths.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Most of the hummers appeared to be male Rufous Hummingbirds and one of them in particular was extremely protective of the flower patch. Here he was resting between feeding and jousting bouts when a female hummer (I’m unsure of the species) challenged him aggressively.<\/p>\n

I find it to be nearly impossible to get two hummingbirds sharp with catch lights in their eyes, especially when one or both of them is in flight. In this photo there’s no light in the eye of the male and the female in flight is a little soft, but not bad.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But I did get lucky with two photos during the encounter where both birds are sharp and…<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

have catch lights in their eyes, even in the smoke.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

There were also several White-lined Sphinx Moths nectaring at the flower patch. In the smoke and low light I was having an unusual amount of trouble locking focus on them in flight but I got a few shots I like reasonably well.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This photo is almost a mirror image of the previous one but the moth is a little larger in the frame.<\/p>\n

On one occasion when I had a moth in my viewfinder I saw a lightning-quick flash of movement from the left frame edge to the right. It was the male (or juvenile) Rufous Hummingbird attacking the moth. It happened so quickly I had no chance to push the shutter button in time so I had to take my eye away from the viewfinder to check on the welfare of the moth. I was afraid the hummer had speared the moth with its dagger-like bill.<\/p>\n

Thankfully the moth survived to fly another day.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: The Rufous Hummingbirds at my feeder have been gone for about a week now so I was slightly and pleasantly surprised to find some on the island.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

I finally found some birds yesterday, with a few White-lined Sphinx Moths thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101861,"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":[3,334,392,394,3512,3508],"tags":[31,140,2168,1679,2173,2187,2167,2170],"class_list":["post-101860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-rufous-hummingbirds","category-white-lined-sphinx-moths","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-fighting","tag-hummingbird-moth","tag-rocky-mountain-bee-plant","tag-rufous-hummingbird","tag-selasphorus-rufus","tag-sphinx-moth","tag-white-lined-sphinx-moth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/rufous-hummingbird-8979-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-quU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101860","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=101860"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101895,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101860\/revisions\/101895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}