{"id":159082,"date":"2024-05-21T05:57:07","date_gmt":"2024-05-21T11:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=159082"},"modified":"2024-05-21T06:35:01","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T12:35:01","slug":"wilsons-phalaropes-at-bear-river-mbr-last-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/21\/wilsons-phalaropes-at-bear-river-mbr-last-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilson’s Phalaropes At Bear River MBR Last Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oddball little birds.<\/p>\n

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Six days ago at Bear River MBR I spent some time up close with two small groups of Wilson’s Phalaropes. Phalaropes are oddball little birds in that their plumage colors and sex roles are reversed from those of most other birds. This boldly and brightly marked phalarope is actually an adult female while the smaller males are much less colorful.<\/p>\n

This from Cornell’s Birds of the World:<\/p>\n

“Wilson’s Phalarope is the largest and most terrestrial of the three phalarope species, which are well known for their reversed sex-role mating system. Larger and more brightly-plumaged females compete for mates and are sometimes polyandrous, whereas males provide all parental care.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Sadly I didn’t photograph any males on that morning. I could have and I wish I had, but I didn’t.<\/p>\n

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This older photo shows how I usually see Wilson’s Phalaropes – in mind-boggling numbers as they’re using Great Salt Lake as a staging area during migration. But on the lake they’re always far away so it was a treat to get relatively close to a few phalaropes at the refuge last week.<\/p>\n

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Back to the same female as in the first photo. At first, when I saw her hunkered down in this pose, I thought she might be trying to sneak up on some small aquatic invertebrate but that wasn’t the case.<\/p>\n

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She was actually just entering deeper water just prior to transitioning from wading to swimming.<\/p>\n

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28 minutes later in a different area of the refuge, this phalarope allowed me an even closer approach. I believe this less boldly marked bird is a female still transitioning into breeding plumage. As was often the case that morning, I didn’t have very good light while I was with her but I think some of my photos of her turned out reasonably well.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the same bird just a few seconds earlier. I’m not fond of the stem poking out of the top of her head but this is the only phalarope shot I got that morning that allows us to see a leg and foot.<\/p>\n

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This might be the most aesthetically pleasing phalarope shot I got that morning, if you like pink. I think the composition of the photo is a strong point, with the placement in the frame of both the bird and the emergent vegetation behind her.<\/p>\n

She was in shade and the pink color of the water is the reflection of warm early morning light on the faraway Promontory Mountains behind her.<\/p>\n

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The placement of her eye in the frame even conformed perfectly to the “rule of thirds”.\u00a0That doesn’t happen very often in my bird photos but when it does, I notice it.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Oddball little birds. (8 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159086,"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":[338,5,334,438],"tags":[7465,49,916,2630,1615,7466,4484,311],"class_list":["post-159082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-wilsons-phalarope-shore-birds","tag-adult-female-wilsons-phalarope","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-composition","tag-phalaropus-tricolor","tag-polyandrous","tag-reversed-sex-role-mating-system","tag-rule-of-thirds","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/wilsons-phalarope-6976-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-FnQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159082","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=159082"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159132,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159082\/revisions\/159132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}