{"id":16045,"date":"2013-06-12T04:54:33","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T10:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=16045"},"modified":"2013-06-12T05:15:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T11:15:13","slug":"mountain-bluebirds-attending-to-nesting-duties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/12\/mountain-bluebirds-attending-to-nesting-duties\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountain Bluebirds Attending To Nesting Duties"},"content":{"rendered":"

On my recent Montana camping trip I was pleased to note that the good folks of Big Sky Country care deeply about their bluebirds.\u00a0 Nest boxes of every description and age seem to be abundant on both private and public land\u00a0and along road corridors.\u00a0 Nesting season was in full swing,\u00a0as were the traditional\u00a0spats between\u00a0Mountain Bluebirds and Tree Swallows for nesting rights to the boxes.<\/p>\n

On these trips I can never resist photographing the bluebirds in particular as they perform their domestic duties. (several\u00a0of these shots were taken at ISO 1000 so you’ll likely notice a little noise in the background).<\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/2000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Here, a gorgeous male\u00a0brings breakfast to a nest-full of youngsters.\u00a0 During summer they consume a variety of insects but caterpillars of various species are their preferred prey.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 1000, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

During incubation and brooding only the male hunts and delivers food to the nest but thereafter both sexes make about equal numbers of feeding trips to the\u00a0fledglings.\u00a0 Here the female is approaching the nest\u00a0opening out of frame to the left.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In a\u00a0different sequence she’s almost there…<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

and at the last second (in the next frame of the burst)\u00a0she flares slightly, pulls up her feet to grasp the bottom of the entrance hole and ducks her head to avoid a collision with the overhanging roof.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 1000, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Here the male makes his exit from the box after a food delivery.\u00a0 He almost looks happy to get out of there…<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/25000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In this\u00a0image a different bluebird (this shot was actually taken in the same area last year) is ground-foraging for a meal.\u00a0 I had no more room to the left in the frame for composition but I still liked the behavior.<\/p>\n

These\u00a0thrushes are energetic and efficient hunters.\u00a0 I found the following quote from BNA Online to be quite the eye-opener: \u00a0“In its behavioral ecology, (the Mountain Bluebird) resembles not so much a thrush, or even other bluebirds, as it does a scaled-down version of an American Kestrel (Falco sparverius)<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 1000, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

With that much food going into the nest, waste disposal becomes an obvious issue and both parents remove fecal sacs after feeding trips.\u00a0 Here the male has just exited the nest hole with a beak-full of those sacs.<\/p>\n

As a kid growing up on a farm in NW Montana I remember Western Bluebirds being relatively abundant but it’s been years since I’ve seen\u00a0one\u00a0up there.\u00a0 That species has mostly disappeared from the valleys of Montana where they were once common due to land-use changes over the years and possibly because of competition from House Sparrows and European Starlings.<\/p>\n

For me, the beautiful, bold and charismatic Mountain Bluebird is a worthy substitute (though I still miss the Western Bluebirds).<\/p>\n

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

On my recent Montana camping trip I was pleased to note that the good folks of Big Sky Country care deeply about their bluebirds. Nest boxes of every description and age seem to be abundant on both private and public land and along road corridors. Nesting season was in full swing, as were the traditional spats between Mountain Bluebirds and Tree Swallows for nesting rights to the boxes.<\/p>\n

On these trips I can never resist photographing the bluebirds in particular as they perform their domestic duties.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16048,"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":[334,1493,1504,391],"tags":[1506,51,737,146,741,1492,256,1505,1507,673],"class_list":["post-16045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-mountain-bluebirds","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-big-sky-country","tag-bird-of-prey","tag-brooding","tag-flight","tag-mountain-bluebird","tag-nest-box","tag-prey","tag-sialia-currocoides","tag-tree-swallow","tag-western-bluebird"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/mountain-bluebird-5619-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4aN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16045","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=16045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}