\u00a01\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nThe nest is buried in\u00a0this greasewood bush next to a road that has lots of human activity so these birds are accustomed to vehicles.\u00a0 I photograph them from my\u00a0pickup and they are not disturbed in the least.\u00a0 The greasewood has hundreds of long\u00a0vertical twigs which makes getting unobstructed take-off shots a challenge.<\/p>\n
Occasionally when the light angle is exactly right the iridescence you get is quite spectacular on a bird that is otherwise lacking in color other than black and white.\u00a0 I’m becoming quite the student of the\u00a0best angle to get the iridescence.<\/p>\n
Soon I plan on doing a post on their nest-building\u00a0 behaviors.\u00a0 But this morning I only had time for this one image.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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I’ve spent the last two mornings photographing\u00a0Black-billed Magpies in the midst of nest construction.\u00a0 These birds often re-use old nests and this is at least the third year they have used the same one.\u00a0 Even when “recycling” the nest like this, weeks of work go in to refurbishing it –\u00a0they bring\u00a0in a completely new lining of grass, mud, rootlets and even bison fur.\u00a0 And they add an amazing number of\u00a0new twigs to the basic structure.\u00a0 These are industrious birds! I’ve said before that this species is my most challenging avian photographic subject and that fact has been reinforced this week.\u00a0 There are several reasons for that, including: the deep black and bright white combination\u00a0is hugely difficult to expose properly that aggravatingly long tail makes composition\u00a0difficult and it is very easy to clip or cut off in action shots they close their nictitating membrane more than any other bird I’ve photographed and when they do its color is a blue-white which is almost shockingly apparent against the black head when they take off from an elevated perch they typically flap once and then fold their wings tightly against the body at exactly the moment when it’s easiest to get them in flight, resulting in what I call a “torpedo-bird”\u00a0flight posture\u00a0that is less than desirable the\u00a0dark eye set against a black head makes it very difficult to get a good catch light in the eye In the last two days I’ve taken over 1200 shots of these magpies and about 95% of them were garbage, largely due…<\/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":[334,363,12],"tags":[57,146,186,230,610],"class_list":["post-13019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-black-billed-magpies","category-magpies-and-ravens","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-flight","tag-iridescence","tag-nesting","tag-pica-hudsonia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3nZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13019","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=13019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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