{"id":114826,"date":"2022-07-22T05:00:32","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=114826"},"modified":"2022-07-22T06:02:02","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T12:02:02","slug":"my-attempt-at-making-a-cowbird-look-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/22\/my-attempt-at-making-a-cowbird-look-good\/","title":{"rendered":"My Attempt At Making A Cowbird Look Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not that they’re ugly. They’re not. But they get such a bad rap because of their nest parasitism habit, most folks (including bird photographers) don’t give them a chance.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Yesterday morning in the mountains I couldn’t resist photographing this cooperative male Brown-headed Cowbird. He was in pretty good light, he was close and I thought his serviceberry perch was attractive. I had a clean look at him and the greenish mountainside in the background provided some nice color.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Intermittently he was “singing” (if you want to call it that) one of their several typical songs that has been described as sounding like “glug glug glee“. <\/em>Personally, I found his singing pose to be more interesting than his actual song.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

At one point he performed a wing and tail stretch but he refused to give me eye contact during the entire long and drawn-out process. This pose was followed by…<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

a vertical wing stretch with more of a head turn and better eye contact.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But I think he looked best with a vertical composition that included more of the serviceberries to dress him up a little. My camera settings were designed for takeoff and flight shots but after spending almost twelve minutes with him he never even hinted at taking off so I drove on down the road to look for other birds.<\/p>\n

I’m glad I stopped for him – these are some of the better cowbird photos I’ve taken. But I’ll admit, that might be due in part to the fact that I tend to ignore cowbirds more often than I do other species.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS:<\/p>\n

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For those who aren’t cowbird fans, I’ll close with a photo of an elk that came in fairly close to me a few minutes earlier while I was photographing other birds. There were at least three elk beginning to come out into the open but immediately after this photo was taken they were scared back into the aspens by a man walking his dog. For some reason my photos of them weren’t very sharp but they document their appearance.<\/p>\n

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Not that they’re ugly. They’re not. But they get such a bad rap because of their nest parasitism habit, most folks (including bird photographers) don’t give them a chance. (6 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114831,"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":[334,1291,1601],"tags":[780,1510,211,1292,1759,4140,284,6444,311,809],"class_list":["post-114826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-brown-headed-cowbird-birds","category-elk-mammals","tag-brown-headed-cowbird","tag-elk","tag-male","tag-molothrus-ater","tag-nest-parasitism","tag-serviceberry","tag-singing","tag-tail-stretch","tag-utah-2","tag-wing-stretch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/brown-headed-cowbird-7491-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-tS2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114826","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=114826"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114875,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114826\/revisions\/114875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}