{"id":147401,"date":"2023-11-29T05:46:13","date_gmt":"2023-11-29T12:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=147401"},"modified":"2023-11-29T06:26:57","modified_gmt":"2023-11-29T13:26:57","slug":"bald-eagle-being-mobbed-by-a-murder-of-crows-yesterday-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/29\/bald-eagle-being-mobbed-by-a-murder-of-crows-yesterday-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Bald Eagle Being Mobbed By A Murder Of Crows Yesterday Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn’t a good time or place to be an eagle.<\/p>\n

Yesterday morning, when I arrived at Farmington Bay WMA about 15 minutes before sunrise, I saw an adult Bald Eagle perched in one of a group of trees to the north of the road. But “he’ was still in the shade of the mountains and he wasn’t very close to the road so I continued on to the 4-way at the end of the road to look for other birds.<\/p>\n

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When I came back about 45 minutes later he was still there but now he was being harrassed by a murder of crows<\/a><\/span><\/span>, about 150 of them. I took several photos from this vantage point just to document a few of the crows but from this angle the eagle was strongly side-lit. So after I took this photo I drove further east to try to improve the light angle.<\/p>\n

Note: The background in today’s photos may look like moody skies but it isn’t. It’s the faraway Wasatch Mountains to the northeast.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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From this angle we can’t see the trees the crows were perched in and the eagle is still side-lit so changing my shooting location didn’t help much. It was at this point that I realized that the crows weren’t sitting passively in those trees. They seemed to be taking turns making life miserable for the eagle.<\/p>\n

Every few seconds one of the crows would dive bomb him.<\/p>\n

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They came from almost every angle and direction but most of them were coming from the trees out of frame to the right.<\/p>\n

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Some of the crows came closer to the eagle than others but the onslaught never let up.<\/p>\n

Occasionally they attacked in pairs, with one crow flying by close to the eagle, apparently to distract him, and then another crow would come in from the eagle’s blind side and appear to actually “count coup<\/a><\/span><\/span>” on the eagle, or at least try to. I could never tell if actual contact was ever made but if it wasn’t, it was close. Very close. Here the eagle is actually ducking in an attempt to avoid the second crow.<\/p>\n

Following is a series of six photos documenting just one of the many attacks.<\/p>\n

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The first crow, the one who flew in front of the eagle to distract him, is already out of frame to the left but at the last second the eagle turned to face this crow coming in from his blind side.<\/p>\n

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Since the eagle was now facing his attacker, the crow…<\/p>\n

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pulled up with only inches to spare. The fact that the eagle is still facing to the right while the crow is already past him demonstrates how fast the action was.<\/p>\n

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The crow landed on the stump to the left but the eagle is already facing his next attacker, who…<\/p>\n

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flew into the frame before the first crow even had time to fold its wings. Almost immediately after the second crow had passed by very close to the eagle, the first crow…<\/p>\n

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took off and flew within inches of the back of the eagle, apparently in an effort to intimidate him. Rubbing salt on his wounded ego?<\/p>\n

After about 15 minutes of this nonstop action the crows, singly or in pairs, began to fly off to the south. Soon there weren’t many crows left so I left too.<\/p>\n

It was fun while it lasted, at least for me.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

It wasn’t a good time or place to be an eagle. (10 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147407,"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":[4456,355,334,2782,394],"tags":[6222,7229,4457,7232,7230,1008,146,400,7231],"class_list":["post-147401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-crows","category-bald-eagles","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-adult-bald-eagle","tag-american-crows","tag-corvus-brachyrhynchos","tag-counting-coup","tag-crows-mobbing-bald-eagle","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-flight","tag-haliaeetus-leucocephalus","tag-what-is-a-murder-of-crows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/bald-eagle-7357-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Clr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147401","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=147401"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147454,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147401\/revisions\/147454"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}