{"id":15932,"date":"2013-06-08T17:42:44","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T23:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=15932"},"modified":"2013-06-09T07:46:08","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T13:46:08","slug":"american-kestrel-with-snake-prey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/08\/american-kestrel-with-snake-prey\/","title":{"rendered":"American Kestrel With Snake Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just arrived home a few hours ago from an exhilarating\u00a0six-day camping and photo trip to western Montana.\u00a0 The weather\u00a0and light\u00a0were good most of the time, the\u00a0birds and mammals often cooperative and always interesting, the natural splendors of that part of the state were infinitely refreshing (as they always are) and\u00a0once again\u00a0we met some colorful and interesting characters that I won’t soon forget.\u00a0 It was one of the best trips ever and at the moment\u00a0I’m both refreshed and exhausted.<\/p>\n

I have many thousands of images to cull and lots of processing to do\u00a0(plus jury duty looms on my horizon next week) so my schedule is exceptionally full but I thought I’d\u00a0do a quick post of some interesting behavior I photographed on our second day of the trip.<\/p>\n

The only redeeming quality of these images is the fairly unusual prey of this male American\u00a0Kestrel so this post is documentary\u00a0only.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I observe and photograph kestrels often but I’ve never\u00a0before\u00a0seen one with snake prey.\u00a0 In my experience it’s always been voles, mice, small birds or (less often) insects.\u00a0 When we first noticed this bird it already had the snake on this bush perch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

For a moment it seemed to struggle with the reptile like it might still be alive or twitching but I couldn’t be sure of that and a few seconds later…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

it flew off with the snake dangling below.<\/p>\n

BNA Online says that kestrels occasionally take small<\/em> snakes as prey but relative to the size of the bird I’m not sure I’d call this a small snake.\u00a0 I suspect it might have been an interesting struggle to watch when this kestrel first pounced on the snake –\u00a0 an encounter I’d love to photograph one day.<\/p>\n

I do wish I\u00a0knew the species of snake.\u00a0 I thought the color in the last shot\u00a0resembled that of a Rubber Boa but the shape doesn’t look quite right with that\u00a0tapered tail.\u00a0 Any ideas?<\/p>\n

I’m\u00a0sure\u00a0I’ll be posting many interesting\u00a0images from this last Montana trip over the next few weeks so stay tuned…<\/p>\n

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

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I observe and photograph kestrels often but I’ve never before seen one with snake prey. In my experience it’s always been voles, mice, small birds or (less often) insects. When we first noticed this bird it already had the snake on this bush perch.<\/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":[340,334,392,1493],"tags":[28,131,220,256,1494],"class_list":["post-15932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-montana-favorite-locations","tag-american-kestrel","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-montana-2","tag-prey","tag-snake"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-48Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15932","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=15932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}