{"id":165685,"date":"2024-12-07T06:17:11","date_gmt":"2024-12-07T13:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=165685"},"modified":"2024-12-07T08:42:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T15:42:50","slug":"hooded-mergansers-now-there-are-three-of-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/07\/hooded-mergansers-now-there-are-three-of-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Hooded Mergansers – Now There Are Three Of Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two males and a female.<\/p>\n

Readers already know that for nearly a week now I’ve been trying to photograph an adult male Hooded Merganser, with little success. On those unusual occasions when I’ve found him, he’s been too wild and shy to allow me to get close. But I don’t have opportunities with this species very often so I’ve been persistent all week. Mostly, it’s just been frustrating.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I was surprised and very pleased to find that the previously lone male had been joined by a second male and a female – for a grand total of three adult Hooded Mergansers. And I couldn’t believe my luck when I discovered that much of the pond was covered with a thin layer of ice, so the mergansers were restricted to a smaller area of the pond. As a result, they only had two choices – to fly off or to allow me to get closer.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, they chose the latter. At least for a while.<\/p>\n

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This is one of the males.<\/p>\n

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The lone female.<\/p>\n

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Usually all three mergansers had their crests (hoods) down or only semi-erected so I always fired off a few shots when one of them fully erected its crest. With two males around, that happened fairly often.<\/p>\n

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I’m a sucker for the flashy white, fan-shaped crest of the males when it’s fully erected.<\/p>\n

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The three mergansers nearly always stuck together in a loose group but I found it impossible to get photos I liked of all three of them. Two of them was about all I could manage.<\/p>\n

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In this shot, the other male was just out of frame to the left. My time with these mergansers is one of the relatively few times I’ve wished that my prime lens was a zoom.<\/p>\n

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Getting both males in a photo I liked was even harder than getting good photos of the female with one of the males. This is about as close as I came. Yes, I was shooting through vegetation or other obstructions much of the time.<\/p>\n

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One of the males at the beginning of a wing flap. Wings forward,…<\/p>\n

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wings back.<\/p>\n

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Their wing flaps were shorter in duration than they are with most other ducks. A couple of quick flaps and they’re done, so I had to be quick on the trigger.<\/p>\n

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There were other ducks on the pond but the mergansers were aloof and usually avoided them. When I took this photo, the three mergansers were intent on reaching a particular area on the other side of the pond, so they swam right through the group of other ducks and one Pied-billed Grebe.<\/p>\n

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One of the males performing another wing flap.<\/p>\n

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I had no idea that this was about to happen, or even that it was happening until right after I took the photo.<\/p>\n

In the shot before this one I was focused on the male and the female was out of frame to the right. My best guess is that the other male merganser (or perhaps a nearby Pied-billed Grebe) was chasing the female and I just happened to catch most of her in the frame as she zoomed by.<\/p>\n

Whatever caused it, I sure as hell wish I hadn’t cut off her tail.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Two males and a female. (13 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165693,"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":[334,4407],"tags":[188,3207,7696,7697,311],"class_list":["post-165685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-hooded-mergansers-waterfowl","tag-jordan-river","tag-lophodytes-cucullatus","tag-male-and-female-hooded-mergansers","tag-prime-lens-versus-zoom-lens","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/hooded-merganser-6402-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-H6l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165685","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=165685"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165738,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165685\/revisions\/165738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}