{"id":104127,"date":"2021-11-15T05:51:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T12:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=104127"},"modified":"2021-11-15T06:04:41","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T13:04:41","slug":"wild-turkey-takeoff-and-flight-sequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/15\/wild-turkey-takeoff-and-flight-sequence\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Turkey Takeoff And Flight Sequence"},"content":{"rendered":"

And the reincarnation of Kevin the Wild Turkey. This time around they may call him Bruce.<\/p>\n

Yesterday morning my best opportunities for bird photography came from a large flock of Wild Turkeys hanging around an isolated ranch in northern Utah.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

Due to thin clouds the light was only mediocre and I was close enough to them that I was usually using my smaller and slower zoom lens so I didn’t have enough shutter speed to prevent motion blur with birds in flight. But when I saw that this hen turkey was about to fly to the ground from the top of an old hay\/equipment barn I couldn’t resist trying to get some flight\/falling shots, despite knowing that I didn’t have quite enough shutter speed for action shots even from such a large bird. As a result some of these photos aren’t as sharp as I’d like them to be.<\/p>\n

Turkeys are very large and heavy birds so short flights like this one was going to be remind me a little of a Sherman tank trying to fly. They’re not very maneuverable in flight and their wings make a tremendous amount of noise. Their flights often make me think they’re a disaster about to happen.<\/p>\n

She picked out her landing spot on the ground and…<\/p>\n

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1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

launched her massive body into the void at a very steep angle.<\/p>\n

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1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

I like her look of determination to hit her landing spot amongst the other turkeys without having it result in a crash landing.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

Here she’s leveling out so that she can…<\/p>\n

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1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

use what I call “parachute mode” to slow the decent of her very heavy body.<\/p>\n

I lost sharp focus on her for the next three photos in the burst so I’m not including them (this one isn’t very sharp either).<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 312 mm<\/em><\/p>\n

I think this last photo illustrates well the pandemonium of a turkey in flight. The motion blur of her wings only enhances it. After this shot I began to cut off body parts.<\/p>\n

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Talk about timing. Last night during a pause in my dinner-cooking activities I happened to look at the KSL News link on my phone and the lead story was about “Kevin” the Wild Turkey<\/a><\/span><\/span> whose antics and personality have helped to bring the community of Fruit Heights, Utah together during the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic. I included the link in the previous sentence and I think it’s worth a look so I hope you check it out.<\/p>\n

It’s funny how we can become so attached to a random wild bird. Or maybe it isn’t.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

And the\u00a0reincarnation of Kevin the Wild Turkey. This time around they may call him Bruce.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104130,"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":[334,3664],"tags":[146,6020,6019,2744,2738,311,2743],"class_list":["post-104127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-wild-turkeys","tag-flight","tag-fruit-heights","tag-kevin-the-wild-turkey","tag-meleagris-gallopavo","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2","tag-wild-turkey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/wild-turkey-9519-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-r5t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104127","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=104127"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104163,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104127\/revisions\/104163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}