1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nA few weeks ago this Western Meadowlark on Antelope Island serenaded me for about 30 seconds while ‘he’ and his mullein perch were bobbing back and forth and up and down in the morning breeze. A moving target like he was used to be a significant challenge for me to keep in sharp focus but in this situation the Canon R5’s animal\/eye detection performed like a champ, so virtually all of my photos of him were very sharp. What a treat.<\/p>\n
I like the photo for its singing pose, diagonal perch (I’ve always been fond of diagonal perches), clean background and unobstructed view of the bird. In the majority of my meadowlark photos the bird is perched on sagebrush, which has numerous vertical twigs that usually block our view of a significant portion of the bird so I appreciate being able to see the entire meadowlark.<\/p>\n
Old, dried mullein flower stems are extremely common on parts of the island but in my experience birds don’t perch on them very often and I’m not sure why. I have a few photos of meadowlarks, Horned Larks, shrikes and even Burrowing Owls perched on dried mullein but not nearly as many as I’d expect to after nearly 14 years of visiting the island regularly with camera in hand.<\/p>\n
What I really lust after is photos of birds perched on mullein when it’s flowering but that happens even less often. I’ve imagined in my mind what a singing meadowlark, with its brilliant yellows, would look like while perched on a flowering mullein stem with its cascade of matching yellow flowers.<\/p>\n
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The reason I don’t have photos like that isn’t for lack of mullein. In July, huge swaths of Antelope Island are festooned with so many flowering mullein that entire hillsides look yellow but finding a bird perched on one of them is a bird photographer’s version of a snipe hunt.<\/p>\n
Mullein is invasive on the island and all those dried flower stalks can be a pain when trying to photograph birds and critters on the ground but their potential as attractive perches when they’re flowering is almost limitless.<\/p>\n
For me at least, that potential remains almost entirely unfulfilled and that’s frustrating. .<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With emphasis on the word “potential”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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