{"id":167126,"date":"2025-03-05T06:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T13:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=167126"},"modified":"2025-03-05T07:13:50","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T14:13:50","slug":"aom-the-reluctant-lothario-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/05\/aom-the-reluctant-lothario-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"AOM – The Reluctant Lothario, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have another sexy story to tell about my favorite American Kestrel (I call him AOM because that’s what it says on his green leg band) and his mate. But this time there are too many photos involved for a single blog post so I’ll publish Part 2 in a day or two.<\/p>\n

On February 10th I photographed AOM mating with his lady on the roof of an Antelope Island pavilion and I posted some of those photos<\/a><\/span><\/span> four days later. Well, six days ago something similar happened while I was there to document it.<\/p>\n

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When I pulled up on the pavilion at the crack of dawn, AOM (on the right) and his mate were huddled together in the cold. Even though they seemed to be making googly eyes at each other (again), I didn’t think they’d be mating anytime soon because of the pretty intense cold. Instead, at first they were all fluffed up like this in order to keep warm.<\/p>\n

For the first few minutes that morning, the cold was causing temperature variations that caused my first kestrel photos to be a little soft. This first photo is one of them, but the problem mostly cleared up pretty quickly.<\/em><\/p>\n

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But less than two minutes later the female moved in front of him, stopped and presented to him a moderate version of a solicitation posture.<\/p>\n

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But he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in romance by stomping away from her and…<\/p>\n

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performing a leisurely wing and tail stretch. She thought about it for a while before she…<\/p>\n

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walked directly in front of him again, stopped and then…<\/p>\n

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performed another solicitation posture – this time with her tail a little higher and her head a little lower. But he responded the same way by walking further to his left…<\/p>\n

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squatting down on the roof and completely ignoring her. She looked frustrated but she wasn’t about to give up. Not yet anyway.<\/p>\n

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She walked directly in front of him a third time and he…<\/p>\n

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responded by walking away from her again.<\/p>\n

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And when she performed an even more exaggerated solicitation posture, his response was to…<\/p>\n

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take off, fly around behind her and…<\/p>\n

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land on the same spot on the south end of the roof where he’d begun – leaving her high and dry and almost certainly frustrated.<\/p>\n

In a little over two minutes she’d tried to seduce him three times. At this point I figured she’d take the hint and give up, but this story isn’t over yet. I plan on telling the rest of it in a couple of days, or possibly tomorrow if I can get the necessary photos processed by then.<\/p>\n

Sorry for the delay but life’s been crazy. Getting my new camping trailer ready for its maiden voyage has proven to be far more time consuming than I expected.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I have another sexy story to tell about my favorite American Kestrel. (12 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167136,"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":[340,3,334,395,391],"tags":[7757,31,7758,7760,473,7759,311],"class_list":["post-167126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-american-kestrel-mating-behavior","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-aom-band-letters","tag-attempt-at-seduction","tag-solicitation-posture","tag-the-reluctant-lothario","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/american-kestrel-4611-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HtA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167126","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=167126"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167165,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167126\/revisions\/167165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}