{"id":103857,"date":"2021-11-08T06:06:18","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T13:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=103857"},"modified":"2021-11-08T07:49:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T14:49:35","slug":"mallard-doing-a-somersault-and-a-partial-barrel-roll-while-bathing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/08\/mallard-doing-a-somersault-and-a-partial-barrel-roll-while-bathing\/","title":{"rendered":"Mallard Doing A Somersault And A Partial Barrel Roll While Bathing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bathing birds are fast. Even larger birds like ducks are surprisingly fast while bathing, so fast that the observer is often unaware of what’s really going on. That’s where photography comes in handy.<\/p>\n

Five days ago I spent some time at a local pond photographing Mallards in an attempt to test my newly repaired lens. I timed my visit to the pond just right to catch many of the Mallards in a bathing frenzy and the male in the following photos was one of my most enthusiastic subjects<\/p>\n

The first 10 photos below are sequential with no skips and were taken in a burst that lasted exactly one second.<\/p>\n

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Just before this sequence began the male Mallard had his back to me so I didn’t begin my burst until he started to bathe again. Here he was using his feet to gain some elevation and momentum at the beginning of a…<\/p>\n

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somersault that essentially flipped him…<\/p>\n

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upside down on the surface of the water.<\/p>\n

Mallards are “dabbling ducks” – they feed in the water by tipping forward and grazing on underwater plants. They’re unusually buoyant and almost never dive so getting his dorsal (back) feathers wet and clean wasn’t easy.<\/em><\/p>\n

This maneuver allowed him to….<\/p>\n

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get his dorsal feathers underwater so at this point he erected them as he shook and quivered almost violently which began to accomplish the task of getting his dorsal feathers wet and clean.<\/p>\n

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Now he had to recover which required a semi-barrel roll as he began to…<\/p>\n

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right himself on the water. Now we can see his yellow bill again.<\/p>\n

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His head emerged and at this point he…<\/p>\n

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shook it violently but I had so much shutter speed (1\/6400) his head didn’t show any motion blur.<\/p>\n

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Here we can see that he was actually using his wings, his left wing in particular, to power his rotation in the water.<\/p>\n

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At that point he popped back up onto the surface.<\/p>\n

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Five frames later the only remnants of his bathing activity were a few tiny water drops near his back that were still flying through the air and a larger drop falling off of his bill.<\/p>\n

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All that’s a pretty extensive agenda to accomplish in just over one second but he did it. And without photography we’d never really know all (or at least most) of the steps involved.<\/p>\n

Much ado about nothing? I suppose it depends on your perspective and your interests. As for me I like seeing stuff like this.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: Do you ever wonder about the origin of weird words like “somersault”? I do.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Mid 16th century (as a noun): from Old French sombresault, from Proven\u00e7al sobresaut, from sobre \u2018above\u2019 + saut \u2018leap\u2019.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Bathing birds are fast. Even larger birds like ducks are surprisingly fast while bathing, so fast that the observer is often unaware of what’s really going on. That’s where photography comes in handy.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103859,"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":[393,334,1172],"tags":[1173,6001,3629,211,213,6002,6000,5999],"class_list":["post-103857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-birds","category-mallard-waterfowl","tag-anas-platyrhynchos","tag-barrel-roll","tag-bathing-technique","tag-male","tag-mallard","tag-origin-of-somersault","tag-somersault","tag-the-steps-of-bathing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/mallard-9808-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-r17","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103857","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=103857"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103896,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103857\/revisions\/103896"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}