{"id":164269,"date":"2024-09-18T06:35:43","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T12:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=164269"},"modified":"2024-09-18T08:22:25","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T14:22:25","slug":"a-morning-of-birds-critters-and-landscapes-in-box-elder-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/18\/a-morning-of-birds-critters-and-landscapes-in-box-elder-county\/","title":{"rendered":"A Morning Of Birds, Critters And Landscapes In Box Elder County"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three days ago I spent the morning in a fairly remote area of Box Elder County. Today I thought I’d try to give my readers a feeling for what my morning was like by including a sampling of critters and landscapes I experienced.<\/p>\n

None of the following photos will win any awards but collectively they’re a fairly accurate representation of one of the more pleasant mornings I’ve had in the field recently.<\/p>\n

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This mama Mule Deer and her twins didn’t appreciate my presence, so the moment I stopped my pickup they vamoosed.<\/p>\n

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These three does just to the south of them were only slightly more tolerant of me. They didn’t run off but they were nervous and highly alert. I saw quite a few deer that morning but none of them were bucks.<\/p>\n

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I was happy to see that there were still a few Turkey Vultures around. It won’t be long until they’ll be gone for the winter.<\/p>\n

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I found this vulture on a natural perch. I believe that’s a deer fly hovering just to the right of the bird.<\/p>\n

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This cottontail may represent part of the reason vultures haven’t left yet. I saw a bunch of cottontails and a few jackrabbits that morning and twice I encountered vultures feeding on rabbit roadkill.<\/p>\n

This cottontail was so intent on chomping on the leaf in its mouth it forgot to run off and hide as I approached.<\/p>\n

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This is a very small part of several loosely associated flocks of 150-200 Chukars that I believe were feeding on insects on the gravel road. I spent nearly 15 minutes driving very slowly toward these Chukars and others in hopes of encouraging them to move off the road so they’d be in better light and in natural habitat but they simply refused. They just kept walking along the road until they eventually flew far away up the mountainside. I hated to make them fly but I couldn’t just sit there all day.<\/p>\n

I think I now know what it must feel like to attempt to herd cats.<\/p>\n

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An immature Red-tailed Hawk in harsh light. I didn’t know it had prey in its talons until I looked at my photos at home.<\/p>\n

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A silly-looking young male Ring-necked Pheasant with a red bullseye around his eye. This guy was running fast across the road so I was very pleased to get him sharp.<\/p>\n

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Rabbitbrush is finally beginning to bloom.<\/p>\n

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But the rabbitbrush doesn’t hold a candle to the blooming sunflowers that are putting on a show right now.<\/p>\n

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This is part of the fire scar of last week’s Willow Springs wildfire. I was anxious to see where this fire had been because I’m so very familiar with, and fond of, the area. The south end of the scar, which is perhaps a quarter mile behind me, came within about 75′ of the barbed wire fence I had to cut in order to extract Galileo<\/a><\/span><\/span> from the wire.<\/p>\n

The far away clump of trees at left center is where the rancher lives that apparently owns the wire I cut.\u00a0 He’s the one that was incredulous that I cut the wire – saying something like ” You cut the fence for an owl? We run into those owls with our vehicles all the time”.<\/p>\n

The fire scar was a bit of a shock but it’ll recover and it wasn’t enough to ruin the rest of my morning – which was wonderful.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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None of the following photos will win any awards but collectively they’re a fairly accurate representation of one of the more pleasant mornings I’ve had in the field recently. (11 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164276,"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":[334,352,8,1410,2136,450,630,356,910],"tags":[689,82,7632,7633,1359,499,451,560,6497,1686,911,3122,7634],"class_list":["post-164269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-chukars","category-ecology-and-environment","category-mule-deer-mammals","category-rabbits","category-red-tailed-hawks","category-ring-necked-pheasants","category-short-eared-owls","category-turkey-vultures","tag-box-elder-county","tag-chukar","tag-landscapes","tag-mountain-cottontail","tag-mule-deer","tag-rabbitbrush","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-ring-necked-pheasant","tag-roadkill","tag-sunflowers","tag-turkey-vulture","tag-wildfire","tag-willow-springs-fire"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/ring-necked-pheasant-8292-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-GJv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164269","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=164269"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164315,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164269\/revisions\/164315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}