{"id":14572,"date":"2013-04-22T02:30:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T08:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=14572"},"modified":"2013-04-22T04:36:41","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T10:36:41","slug":"mountain-plovers-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/22\/mountain-plovers-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountain Plovers Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

As some of you know, 10 days ago we found a pair of Mountain Plovers on Antelope Island.\u00a0 These\u00a0plovers are rare in Utah, the few that are seen here\u00a0are on their way to Montana,\u00a0Wyoming and Colorado\u00a0to breed\u00a0so after a day or two these birds were gone.\u00a0\u00a0But they sure\u00a0created\u00a0a buzz in the birding community while they were here.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0posted about these birds the day after I\u00a0photographed them but I thought such an eventful and unusual sighting was worthy of some more images.<\/p>\n

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\u00a01\/5000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Mountain Plovers are fairly large for a plover.\u00a0 They are\u00a0roughly Killdeer sized but have longer legs and a more erect posture.\u00a0 They’re rather drab and lack the black breast bands found on many other plovers.\u00a0 I really enjoy their relatively subtle coloration.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/8, ISO 400, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The plover pair spent virtually all of their time foraging for insects, which they did with intensity.\u00a0\u00a0That made it difficult to catch one standing still for a portrait.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 400, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

They were efficient hunters, catching and eating many insect larvae in the time I spent with them.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/8, ISO 400, 400 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I’m not sure what was really going on here but this time the bird, after capturing the insect, flung it through the air in front of it.\u00a0 Here you can see it in mid-air in front of the bird (there’s also a piece of debris directly\u00a0in front of the bill).\u00a0 I don’t recall if the bird retrieved the insect again but this was the only time I saw this happen.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t believe that I’ve ever photographed another species that was as wary of larger, potentially dangerous birds flying overhead.\u00a0 Every time a gull, hawk or raven did so the plovers would\u00a0lay down in the grass like this and maintain that position for several minutes after the larger bird was long gone.\u00a0 And one of the two plovers was much more timid that way than the other.\u00a0 In contrast, and typical of the species, they had absolutely no fear of me or my pickup.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It’s very possible, even\u00a0likely that I will never see another Mountain Plover so this was a memorable experience for me and I’m sure glad I have the images from that morning to make the memories more vivid.<\/p>\n

But if I’m lucky I may see some of\u00a0these\u00a0Mountain Plovers\u00a0on their breeding grounds on one of my Montana trips, which is something I’d very much like to do.\u00a0These are my kind of birds – they have an attitude.\u00a0 They often charge and chase several species of ground squirrels who are predators of their eggs and chicks and they do the same thing\u00a0(charge and chase) with pronghorns and cattle in the vicinity of their nest.\u00a0 They even occasionally “flutter jump” (flap wings and jump) in the face of cattle to distract them.<\/p>\n

I like that.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

As some of you know, 10 days ago we found a pair of Mountain Plovers on Antelope Island. These plovers are rare in Utah, the few that are seen here are on their way to Montana, Wyoming and Colorado to breed so after a day or two these birds were gone. But they sure created a buzz in the birding community while they were here.<\/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":[334,1376],"tags":[31,1378,136,1377,256,1397],"class_list":["post-14572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-mountain-plovers","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-charadrius-montanus","tag-feeding","tag-mountain-plover","tag-prey","tag-rare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3N2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14572","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=14572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}