{"id":135820,"date":"2023-05-15T06:35:05","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T12:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=135820"},"modified":"2023-05-15T07:16:15","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T13:16:15","slug":"yellow-rumped-warbler-preening-and-acting-a-little-nuts-after-his-bath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/15\/yellow-rumped-warbler-preening-and-acting-a-little-nuts-after-his-bath\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellow-rumped Warbler Preening And Acting A Little Nuts After His Bath"},"content":{"rendered":"

There must have been something in the water.<\/p>\n

I had an early, early morning errand to run and I didn’t get home until 5:45 AM so if my narration sounds rushed, it’s because it was. Hopefully these photos of interesting grooming behaviors help to make up for it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Four days ago in a remote area of Box Elder County I was watching the area around a seep (a place where water oozes slowly out of the ground) I’m quite familiar with for any bird activity when a male Yellow-rumped Warbler popped up where I could see him. He wasn’t very close but he was obviously wet from a bath he’d just taken in the seep so I had hopes for some interesting post-bath preening photos. He didn’t disappoint.<\/p>\n

The photos below mostly speak for themselves so I’ll keep my narration to a minimum. All photos are presented in the order they were taken.<\/p>\n

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This is the very first shot I got out of almost 700 photos I took of him while he was grooming and carrying on after his bath.<\/p>\n

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Scratching his face. If you look carefully you’ll see that the faint catchlight in his eye is an unusual linear, diagonal line. I don’t know what caused it to be that shape at that angle.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s looking down at something near his nether region that apparently needed his attention.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

So he responded appropriately.<\/p>\n

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He pulled his top two flight feathers through his bill multiple times in order to ‘re-zip’ the hooks holding the barbules together. He did this so fast I was barely aware he was doing it until I looked at my photos at home.<\/p>\n

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The speed of his furious grooming activities was impressive, as evidenced by the distorted shape of his usually straight and stiff tail feathers.<\/p>\n

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Grooming his armpit (wingpit?).<\/p>\n

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Another go at those top primary wing feathers.<\/p>\n

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Don’t ask me to explain this weirdo pose (yes, his head is upside down). Perhaps he’d been smoking something during his bath…<\/p>\n

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Then he moved to a different spot on the branch to do some more shimmy-shaking.<\/p>\n

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Soon he turned again and took off. I thought he was gone for good but…<\/p>\n

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he only flew a short distance to another perch. But at this point most of his grooming was over. He just sat in the sun for a short time before eventually flying off to who knows where.<\/p>\n

It was fun while it lasted.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: Image techs for these photos are in the range of 1\/2000 – 1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800 – 1250, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc<\/em><\/p>\n

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

There must have been something in the water. (12 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135829,"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":[393,334,1278],"tags":[46,168,211,255,5336,3131,311,1279],"class_list":["post-135820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-birds","category-yellow-rumped-warbler","tag-bath","tag-grooming","tag-male","tag-preening","tag-seep","tag-setophaga-coronata","tag-utah-2","tag-yellow-rumped-warbler-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/yellow-rumped-warbler-4227-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-zkE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135820","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=135820"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135876,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135820\/revisions\/135876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}