{"id":14331,"date":"2013-04-13T05:12:30","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T11:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=14331"},"modified":"2013-04-13T07:29:50","modified_gmt":"2013-04-13T13:29:50","slug":"amorous-avocets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/13\/amorous-avocets\/","title":{"rendered":"Amorous Avocets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning I visited Bear River\u00a0Migratory Bird Refuge and found lots of evidence that spring is finally beginning to pop.<\/p>\n

One of the things I always look for this time of year is little pods of American Avocets and Black-necked Stilts fighting and chattering away\u00a0with the intensity of hormone-infused behaviors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"american<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/9, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Having witnessed the rituals of avocets mating many times before I knew what was about to happen when this female laid her bill down on the water’s surface and presented herself to the male.\u00a0 This time I got the shot, even with catch lights in the eye of both birds.\u00a0 So often in the past they’ve had\u00a0their backs to me when it happened.<\/p>\n

Here the male has just mounted the female (as evidenced by the three large falling water drops) and is holding his long, recurved bill to the side of her head as they usually do at this stage of the process.<\/p>\n

I only have time for a single image of\u00a0this complex\u00a0process this morning.\u00a0 Soon, perhaps tomorrow, I’ll post a sequence of images of this very interesting ritualized\u00a0behavior.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having witnessed the rituals of avocets mating many times before I knew what was about to happen when this female laid her bill down on the water’s surface and presented herself to the male. This time I got the shot. So often in the past they’ve had their backs to me when it happened.<\/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":[437,334,391],"tags":[27,49,1016,471,293],"class_list":["post-14331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-avocets-shore-birds","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-american-avocet","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-mating","tag-recurvirostra-americana","tag-spring"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3J9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14331","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=14331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}