{"id":164743,"date":"2024-10-11T06:03:53","date_gmt":"2024-10-11T12:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=164743"},"modified":"2024-10-11T07:53:49","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T13:53:49","slug":"a-few-recent-birds-and-a-critter-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/11\/a-few-recent-birds-and-a-critter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Recent Birds And A Critter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Potpourri. Six photos of four species.<\/p>\n

All photos were taken in the last eight days at Farmington Bay WMA or on Antelope Island.<\/p>\n

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A lone Greater Yellowlegs that was foraging for food amongst a fairly large group of American Avocets. Here the bird had partially raised and then lowered its wings so quickly I didn’t even know it had occurred until I looked at my photos at home. It wasn’t much more than a wing twitch but I think it makes the photo a little more interesting.<\/p>\n

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A coyote in a sea of grass.<\/p>\n

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The same photo, uncropped. I don’t know why but I like seeing the coyote smaller in the frame in all that grass. The soft but very long shadow of the coyote accurately indicates that the photo was taken only minutes after sunrise.<\/p>\n

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A banded female American Kestrel on a sign that has been a favorite kestrel hunting perch for years.<\/p>\n

I wanted takeoff\/flight shots of course but fate had other plans. While I had her in my viewfinder, two very noisy medium-sized trucks loaded with Honey Bucket porta pottys for distribution on the refuge (duck hunting season was scheduled to open in two days) approached from the east. I was parked on the far side of a large dirt parking lot so I figured they’d pass by far enough away from me that I didn’t worry about them scaring off the kestrel.<\/p>\n

The first truck did as I expected but the second one inexplicably turned off the road and pulled up and stopped close to my pickup, which…<\/p>\n

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scared off the kestrel of course, giving me only butt shots. Immediately after the kestrel flew off, the truck left and followed the other one.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure the truck driver saw the kestrel, and my huge lens pointing at her, and got his morning jollies by deliberately scaring her off and ruining my opportunity. If I’m right, and I believe I am, I think the driver fully deserves his job delivering, retrieving and cleaning out ‘poop palaces’. May he have that job until he retires.<\/p>\n

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I’ll close on a more positive note.<\/p>\n

This is the most aggressive of the several Northern Harriers that were harassing two juvenile Cooper’s Hawks at Farmington. Here the harrier had just flown past very close to one of the perched hawks, who is just out of frame to the right.<\/p>\n

I believe she’s communicating something with this unusual wing position because she held this same wing position, or very close to it, for long enough for me to get four consecutive photos of it.<\/p>\n

If so, I wish I knew what that “something” was.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Addendum:<\/em><\/p>\n

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As an afterthought I decided to include the photo in the burst that was taken just before the first harrier photo above. I probably should have included it in my original post. I didn’t include it originally because the harrier is a little soft.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Potpourri. Six photos of four species.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164749,"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],"tags":[28,31,98,1008,1727,7649,234,7650,311],"class_list":["post-164743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-american-kestrel","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-coyote","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-greater-yellowlegs-2","tag-honey-bucket-portable-restrooms","tag-northern-harrier","tag-poop-palace","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/northern-harrier-0152-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-GR9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164743","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=164743"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164782,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164743\/revisions\/164782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}