{"id":119212,"date":"2022-09-17T06:02:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T12:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=119212"},"modified":"2022-09-19T04:34:41","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T10:34:41","slug":"amaranth-a-bounty-of-food-for-fall-yard-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/17\/amaranth-a-bounty-of-food-for-fall-yard-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Amaranth – A Bounty Of Food For Fall Yard Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Including American Goldfinches.<\/p>\n

I didn’t go out shooting yesterday so I had no plans to post to my blog today but circumstances intervened. Yesterday morning, after blustery weather the day before, my back yard birds were feasting on seeds from the amaranth plants in my poor excuse for a vegetable garden. So I couldn’t resist setting up my tripod and documenting their banquet from the comfort of one of my patio chairs.<\/p>\n

The early morning light was dappled and highly variable, which explains my camera settings and shutter speeds. While the birds were feeding on the mostly vertical amaranth plumes they typically had their backs to me. So for today’s post I’ll concentrate on a single female American Goldfinch who was near the very tip of one of the plumes, so she was more isolated from the rest of the setting and background.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Amaranth plumes are nothing if they aren’t colorful. I like their reds when combined with the yellow\/golds of goldfinches.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes they were flitting around from plume to plume so often I couldn’t get focused on them before they took off, but this little lady had staying power. She fed on seeds from this plume for long enough to allow me to get hundreds of shots of her before a busybody House Finch chased her off.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

There was a glut of tiny seeds to choose from but she seemed pretty picky about which ones she preferred. Sometimes she appeared to carefully inspect them visually before choosing one.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

No matter which species I was photographing, usually an American Goldfinch or a House Finch, they usually had those telltale little red seeds (or their husks) stuck to their bills.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

If she dropped a seed or two in the process, she didn’t care. She just…<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

helped herself to more.<\/p>\n

Sometimes she had most of her face buried deep in the plume for long enough that I had the impression that she was choosing her preferred seeds by feel rather than by sight. For those shots her eye was typically hidden in the plume so I’m not including any of them.<\/p>\n

She stayed here so long she obviously loved this particular feeding spot but eventually…<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

a pushy House Finch displaced her.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a different goldfinch on a different catkin-like flower plume (technically a cyme). Each one of those tiny red flowers produces a single, round and apparently nutritious seed.<\/p>\n

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And man, are there ever lots of them to choose from. This is mostly a single plume and each amaranth plant has about a dozen plumes, from very large to quite small.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/5.6, f\/1600, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

And the birds sure love those seeds, at least many of them do. And for my preference, amaranth has another advantage. House Sparrows are the most common bird in my back yard but I seldom see House Sparrows feeding on amaranth seeds. They much prefer my feeder and I’m fine with that.<\/p>\n

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Cell phone photo<\/em><\/p>\n

This was my shooting scenario for the photos I took yesterday. This year the largest of my amaranth plants (by now they’re past their prime) is 9 1\/2′ tall but in previous years they’ve been even taller and produced larger plumes. This year, due to our unusually hot temps, our drought and my current physical limitations, my entire garden did poorly. The amaranth did better than most. My spaghetti squash did pretty well too but that’s probably because it gets more shade from the trees on the left.<\/p>\n

Even my tomatoes produced poorly this year. Earlier this summer I promised my neighbor Ryan that he’d be the recipient of my excess tomatoes but I haven’t had enough to share with him until yesterday. I feel bad about that.<\/p>\n

Hopefully we’ll both have a bounty of tomatoes for the next few weeks, to match the current bounty of amaranth seeds for the birds.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Correction: Apparently these are Lesser Goldfinches, not American Goldfinches. Two knowledgeable blog followers have pointed out my error in the comments below. Hate it when I do that…<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Including American Goldfinches. (11 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119221,"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":[3823,334,392],"tags":[6536,1757,6539,137,6538,655,311,6537],"class_list":["post-119212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-goldfinch-birds","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-amaranth-seeds-for-birds","tag-american-goldfinch-2","tag-cyme","tag-female","tag-garden-tomatoes","tag-house-finch","tag-utah-2","tag-what-seeds-do-house-sparrows-not-like"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/american-goldfinch-8855-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-v0M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119212","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=119212"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119380,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119212\/revisions\/119380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}