{"id":102628,"date":"2021-09-23T05:32:54","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T11:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=102628"},"modified":"2021-09-23T07:29:13","modified_gmt":"2021-09-23T13:29:13","slug":"yesterdays-ferruginous-hawk-the-rest-of-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/23\/yesterdays-ferruginous-hawk-the-rest-of-the-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s Ferruginous Hawk – The Rest Of The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I posted a single photo out of a series of photos I took of an immature Ferruginous Hawk two days ago in the west desert. In that post I said I’d be posting more of them very soon. These are those photos.<\/p>\n

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This Ferruginous Hawk was hunting from a fence post along a dirt road as I approached it. Before I could get anywhere near ‘him’ he took off after potential prey that he’d spotted in the dried grasses about 150 yards to the south of the road I was on. I watched him through my lens as he flew toward whatever he’d spotted and even though he was tiny in my viewfinder I couldn’t resist firing off a few shots as he was landing.<\/p>\n

He failed to catch anything and after a short time he…<\/p>\n

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flew back to the fence line he’d been hunting from and…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

landed on a different fence post west of the post he’d been hunting from earlier. This time he allowed me to get close enough for takeoff and flight shots when he took off after prey again (something I’d seen him do several times as I slowly approached him from far away).<\/p>\n

When he landed on this post he was facing to my right but he soon spotted potential prey behind him so here he’s twisting on his perch to go after it.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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, taken immediately after he left the fence post, is one of my two favorites of the series.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

He gained elevation quickly, more quickly than I expected him to (especially for such a large, heavy bird), so I clipped wings in several of the photos of the series but got lucky with this one.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

Now he’s beginning to level out and build up speed.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 is the photo I posted yesterday but for the sake of continuity I decided to include it again.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

You can’t come much closer than this to clipping a wing without actually doing it. I like the way he’s tucked his legs up so tightly against his tail.<\/p>\n

I got quite a few more shots of this hawk in flight but I clipped body parts in many of them and after this photo was taken he appeared to abandon his attempt at prey and turned away from me. He made a long, sweeping turn and returned to the fence line to hunt again. But this time a noisy pickup pulling a horse trailer came up from behind me and spooked the hawk. Bad timing but at least I got this series before that incredibly noisy and dusty contraption came along.<\/p>\n

Overall I’m quite happy with this series, especially photos #4 and #7. Having morning light on the bird and the dark mountains in the background was a bonus.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note:<\/em><\/p>\n

I screwed up one potentially excellent photo in the series so badly I originally decided to leave it out. But at the last minute I changed my mind because I know that many of my blog followers are fellow bird photographers and I thought including the photo and explaining what happened might prevent other photographers from making the same mistake I did.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ferruginous Hawks are our largest heaviest hawks so when this one took off I expected him to launch pretty close to horizontally rather than attempting to gain elevation quickly. When this species takes off from elevated perches that’s what they usually do.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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But when this guy launched he took off at a steeper angle than I expected him to (that steeper angle is more apparent in photos #4 and #5 than it is in this one). So in order to compensate, and hopefully keep him in frame during and immediately after takeoff, I instinctively and reflexively\u00a0jerked my lens upward while this shot was being taken which resulted in terrible “long lens technique” and a soft bird. And it didn’t keep me from clipping his wing anyway. <\/em><\/p>\n

For obvious reasons this photo will end up in the trash bin.<\/em><\/p>\n

After nearly 14 years of photographing birds I still occasionally jerk my lens in unexpected situations like this. For me it’s been a surprisingly hard habit to break.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Yesterday I posted a single photo out of a series of photos I took of an immature Ferruginous Hawk two days ago in the west desert. In that post I said I’d be posting more of them very soon. These are those photos.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102632,"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":[6,334,377],"tags":[1940,531,138,146,768,190,5462,2738,1357,311],"class_list":["post-102628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-ferruginous-hawks","tag-bird-photography-technique","tag-buteo-regalis","tag-ferruginous-hawk","tag-flight","tag-immature","tag-juvenile","tag-long-lens-technique","tag-takeoff","tag-tooele-county","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/ferruginous-hawk-2708-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-qHi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102628","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=102628"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102675,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102628\/revisions\/102675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}