{"id":115892,"date":"2022-08-05T06:12:07","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T12:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=115892"},"modified":"2022-08-05T07:42:12","modified_gmt":"2022-08-05T13:42:12","slug":"immature-red-tailed-hawk-practice-landing-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/05\/immature-red-tailed-hawk-practice-landing-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Immature Red-tailed Hawk – Practice Landing #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

An 18-image takeoff, flight and landing series. Yes, I got carried away.<\/p>\n

Recently I photographed a young and unusually dark Red-tailed Hawk as ‘he’ was practicing his landings by repeatedly taking off and landing on rocky perches that were close to each other. Four days ago I posted a single photo of him about to land on one of those rocks but I think the entire series of photos of that takeoff, flight and landing deserve to be seen. So that’s what I’m posting today.<\/p>\n

The first 16 photos below are sequential without any skips. There are skips just prior to or after the last two.<\/p>\n

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This is takeoff #1 (the only one I’m presenting today.) At the time I didn’t yet know he was practicing his landings so I expected this to be the beginning of a long flight. So when he abruptly landed again I was lucky to keep him in frame for the entire series<\/p>\n

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He took off at a pretty steep angle for such a large bird but he really didn’t have much choice because there was a fairly steep mountainside in front of him in that direction.<\/p>\n

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Gaining elevation quickly.<\/p>\n

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When cropping these photos, whenever I could I tried to keep at least some of the vegetation below him in frame to allow the viewer to judge…<\/p>\n

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how far above the rocky slope he was but…<\/p>\n

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I couldn’t always succeed.<\/p>\n

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With this position of his feet and legs he’s already beginning to provide a hint that he might not be going far but of course I didn’t notice it at the time because…<\/p>\n

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I was too busy trying to keep him in frame.<\/p>\n

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This flight angle and body posture also suggest that he might be landing soon…<\/p>\n

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but on what? I still had no clue and fully expected him to continue his flight.<\/p>\n

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Finally, we see part of his next rock perch in front of him. But all this was happening too fast for me to process the information and react to it. I was just flying by the seat of my pants as I tried to keep him in frame, no matter what happened.<\/p>\n

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Another flight posture similar to the one three photos ago that strongly suggests imminent landing.<\/p>\n

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This is the shot I posted four days ago.<\/p>\n

After this photo my luck ran out.<\/p>\n

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In the next shot his left wing covered his face and in the photo after that…<\/p>\n

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that wing hid the entire upper half of his body. Things got worse after that.<\/p>\n

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I cut off a wing when he landed because I still hadn’t had time to process what he was doing so I continued to pan my lens to my left as the bird unexpectedly stopped his forward motion.<\/p>\n

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Within about 5 seconds of landing he was already looking at his next practice perch at upper left. But I won’t include those photos today because I’ve probably already overdone it.<\/p>\n

So, how far do you think he flew before he landed on his new perch?<\/p>\n

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This photo (even though it isn’t sharp for some reason) provides some clues. It was taken from a different position when I first spotted him but he’s perched on the same rock he took off from. The rock he landed on is just out of frame at upper left (it’s an upper extension of the rock we do see up there.) I’d estimate that he didn’t fly further than 15′ or so.<\/p>\n

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So why did I post so many photos? Wouldn’t half this many be more than enough? I don’t think so. I believe there’s value in seeing an entire flight series, especially when there aren’t any skips, for the better understanding of the dynamics of takeoff, flight and landing it provides.<\/p>\n

I don’t do it more often because I rarely photograph an entire flight from beginning to end (this might be the first time.)\u00a0 And I usually can’t keep the entire bird in the frame for that long anyway.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: Image techs for these photos were at or near 1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc<\/em><\/p>\n

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An 18-image takeoff, flight and landing series. Yes, I got carried away.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115895,"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":[334,450],"tags":[452,146,579,6474,451,2738,311],"class_list":["post-115892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-flight","tag-landing","tag-practicing-landing","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/red-tailed-hawk-9025-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-u9e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115892","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=115892"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115983,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115892\/revisions\/115983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}