{"id":117095,"date":"2022-08-22T04:30:51","date_gmt":"2022-08-22T10:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=117095"},"modified":"2022-08-22T05:20:49","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T11:20:49","slug":"loggerhead-shrikes-courtship-feeding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/22\/loggerhead-shrikes-courtship-feeding\/","title":{"rendered":"Loggerhead Shrikes “Courtship Feeding”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally I rerun a favorite older post but today you get a ‘twofer’ because I’m combining two posts that were published way back in May of 2014. Obviously, I’ve had to rewrite and reorganize much of the text and tweak the formatting. I’ve also changed the title(s) to make the terminology up to date.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On May 20 and 21, 2014 I photographed a behavior called “courtship feeding” in Loggerhead Shrikes on Antelope Island. Cornell’s Birds of the World describes the behavior in shrikes as follows:<\/p>\n

“Female accepts prey from male when ready to form a pair bond; such feeding continues throughout incubation and nestling period. Female begs food by crouching, head pointed up, wings drooped and fluttering; silent at first, she gives begging notes as nesting progresses.”<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

On the first morning the midges on the island were thick so they can be seen in all of my photos of the shrikes. Midges don’t bite but they can still be annoying to both photographers and even birds and this female shrike had them flying all around her. She was unusually “sticky” on this perch and at first I didn’t know why she was so reluctant to leave it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

But it soon became apparent that she was waiting to be fed by her mate. Here he has just flown in with what appears to be a large insect pupa and she shows obvious interest.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0But then, for a few moments, she seemed unwilling to take the insect which appeared to confuse her mate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/1600, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0But soon she hopped down off her lofty perch to a horizontal branch just below it and took the pupa when it was offered.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/1600, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

She manipulated it with her beak for a few seconds and then flew off with it. I don’t know if she eventually ate it herself or delivered it to possible chicks in the nest<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The very next morning (May 21) I returned to the island, and to the same dead branch, in the hopes of finding the shrikes repeating the courtship feeding behavior.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

And there she was, the female was on a different part of the same dead branch as she waited for another food delivery. On this morning there were no midges to speak of.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Soon her mate appeared, this time with an insect larva. You’ll notice that he’s banded so it’s the same pair of shrikes as the previous day. Many of the shrikes on the island had been banded by my friends from the Great Salt Lake Institute (GSLI) out of Westminster College as part of their study of how mercury compounds move through the food chain in and near the Great Salt Lake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

He offered the insect to her and this time she…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0accepted it immediately and…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

gobbled it down just as fast. Then both birds flew off at almost the same time.<\/p>\n

Because I observed the same behavior on the same perch on two consecutive mornings I began to think of this dead branch as some sort of “feeding station”. The ‘whitewash’ from bird droppings on both forks of the branch seem to reinforce that notion.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

An interesting Loggerhead Shrike behavior I photographed on two consecutive mornings. (10 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24132,"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":[3,334,8,392,346,395,391],"tags":[31,1624,1973,6496,622,6495,6494,409,206,6493,1571,1980,311],"class_list":["post-117095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","category-miscellaneous","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-banded","tag-courtship-feeding","tag-feeding-station","tag-great-salt-lake-institute","tag-insect-larva","tag-insect-pupa","tag-lanius-ludovicianus","tag-loggerhead-shrike","tag-male-feeding-female","tag-mate-feeding","tag-midges","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/loggerhead-shrike-2302-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-usD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117095","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=117095"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117155,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117095\/revisions\/117155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}