Wilson’s Phalarope and his four chicks<\/a><\/span><\/span> that I posted photos of four days ago, a pair of American Avocets walked into the area and caused quite a ruckus. For some reason the avocets were unhappy about the close presence of several phalaropes and they made their displeasure known by trying to chase the phalaropes off.<\/p>\nRepeated attempts (this is one of the later ones) by the avocets had little effect on the much smaller phalaropes, who of course were reluctant to leave their youngsters behind. So other than avoiding the attacks of the larger, slower avocets, the phalaropes just went about their business. Or tried to.<\/p>\n
At first I was curious about why the avocets seemed so grouchy and aggressive but soon the reason became obvious.<\/p>\n
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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nA single avocet chick came out of the grasses on one of the small islands in the standing water and walked toward the shore, generally in my direction. ‘He’ wasn’t particularly close and he was hard to focus on but I managed to get a few sharp shots of him.<\/p>\n
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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nBut there was light in his eye in only two of them. As you can see by the position of the catchlight at the very top of his eye, by this time it was later in the morning and the sun was high enough in the sky to make getting catchlights difficult.<\/p>\n
After I took this photo he walked down to the water and spent all his time feeding with his head down and mostly with his back to me. Then he disappeared into the grasses again. But that didn’t appease his parents, who continued to harass the phalaropes who were just trying to mind their own chicks.<\/p>\n
Parenthood is never easy, particularly for birds.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chicks of two species close together cause pandemonium in the wetlands. (3 photos)<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160498,"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":[437,338,334,394,438],"tags":[7010,7492,49,7493,471,311],"class_list":["post-160497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-avocets-shore-birds","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-wilsons-phalarope-shore-birds","tag-american-avocet-chick","tag-avocets-fighting-with-phalaropes","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-getting-catchlights-in-the-eye","tag-recurvirostra-americana","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/american-avocet-2510-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-FKF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160497","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=160497"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160524,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160497\/revisions\/160524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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