{"id":11591,"date":"2013-01-17T06:52:34","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T13:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=11591"},"modified":"2013-01-17T06:52:34","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T13:52:34","slug":"rough-legged-hawk-mantling-then-take-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/17\/rough-legged-hawk-mantling-then-take-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Rough-legged Hawk Mantling, Then Take-off"},"content":{"rendered":"

My encounter with this Rough-legged Hawk was a frustrating one.\u00a0 It all began with a Northern Harrier on the snow-covered ground with prey (which turned out to be a Pied-billed Grebe)\u00a0.\u00a0 It was quite far away, even if my tc had been attached (it wasn’t), so I put my pickup in gear to drive further down the road.\u00a0\u00a0 Just then\u00a0this hawk swooped in from behind (I\u00a0couldn’t see it coming) to\u00a0pilfer the prey from the harrier.<\/p>\n

By the time I got the pickup turned off and my tc attached the action between the\u00a0 two raptors was over – the harrier had vamoosed with the head of the grebe (based on the photos Mia was able to get) and the roughie was on the ground with what was left.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Here the hawk is “mantling” the grebe.\u00a0 Mantling is a behavior of raptors where they spread their wings, fan their tail and arch their body over their prey –\u00a0effectively hiding it from other predators, particularly other raptors.\u00a0\u00a0 In this image the tail isn’t completely fanned and the bird is looking back at us rather than arching its body.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a patch of blood on the snow and you can see part of the grebe under the right wing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0The hawk quickly gobbled down what was left of the grebe, inspected the area for a few seconds to make sure it hadn’t missed any tasty\u00a0morsels and then took off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0I took quite a few photos as the bird launched and flew to my left but only a few of them were relatively sharp with no clipped body parts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This was the last decent image I got before the bird was too far past me.<\/p>\n

I love the combination of my 500 mm lens attached to the tc for the extra reach it gives me (I’m effectively shooting at 1120 mm with the cropped sensor of my\u00a0Canon 7D)\u00a0\u00a0but there’s definitely a down side.\u00a0\u00a0 Even though\u00a0I’ve become pretty quick and efficient at swapping out the tc, occasionally I do miss some very interesting shots while I’m doing it.<\/p>\n

It seems like there’s\u00a0always trade-offs…<\/p>\n

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

My encounter with this Rough-legged Hawk was a frustrating one.\u00a0 It all began with a Northern Harrier on the snow-covered ground with prey (which turned out to be a Pied-billed Grebe)\u00a0.\u00a0 It was quite far away, even if my tc had been attached (it wasn’t), so I put my pickup in gear to drive further down the road.\u00a0\u00a0 Just then\u00a0this hawk swooped in from behind (I\u00a0couldn’t see it coming) to\u00a0pilfer the prey from the harrier. By the time I got the pickup turned off and my tc attached the action between the\u00a0 two raptors was over – the harrier had vamoosed with the head of the grebe (based on the photos Mia was able to get) and the roughie was on the ground with what was left.   \u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in Here the hawk is “mantling” the grebe.\u00a0 Mantling is a behavior of raptors where they spread their wings, fan their tail and arch their body over their prey –\u00a0effectively hiding it from other predators, particularly other raptors.\u00a0\u00a0 In this image the tail isn’t completely fanned and the bird is looking back at us rather than arching its body.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a patch of blood on the snow and you can see part of the grebe under the right wing.     \u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in \u00a0The hawk quickly gobbled down what was left of the grebe, inspected the…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":[334,358],"tags":[1156,534,68,1157,146,907,256,269,605,1155,453],"class_list":["post-11591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-rough-legged-hawks","tag-500-mm-lens","tag-buteo-lagopus","tag-canon-7d","tag-cropped-sensor","tag-flight","tag-mantling","tag-prey","tag-rough-legged-hawk","tag-take-off","tag-tc","tag-teleconverter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-30X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11591","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=11591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}