{"id":167412,"date":"2025-03-21T06:05:17","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T12:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=167412"},"modified":"2025-03-21T07:59:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T13:59:53","slug":"pond-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/21\/pond-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Pond Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Including my first Osprey of the year.<\/p>\n

First, an explanation of how I was able to go shooting while I don’t have a reliable vehicle.<\/p>\n

Last week I was told by my Ford service advisor that they have another pickup just like mine in their shop that has the same engine problem as mine. When they figure out what’s wrong with that pickup, and get it repaired, they’ll have me bring mine in for the same repair. Both pickups are a mystery to them – they have the same symptoms but they’re not throwing any codes.<\/em><\/p>\n

So I wait, in limbo. I’ve been told I can drive my pickup for short trips around town (my larder was becoming bare so I finally stocked up on groceries) but I’d be taking a big chance if I drove it further, to places like my typical birding spots. So I continue to be grounded from birding trips with no end in sight and I’m not happy about it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Three days ago, mostly out of frustration, I visited one of the several local ponds I frequent and found a few birds.<\/p>\n

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It happened to be during our biggest snowstorm so far this winter, so conditions were challenging to say the least. I’m only including this photo of a Double-crested Cormorant in flight to document those conditions. Needless to say, I won’t be including any more photos taken that day.<\/p>\n

But the next day at the same pond was different. What a difference a day can make.<\/p>\n

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It was cold with lots of snow on the ground but skies were clear and blue and the light was excellent. I even found a few interesting birds, including this cormorant. Normallly, cormorants on the pond are very shy but that afternoon several of them came in close, almost too close.<\/p>\n

Following are photos of a few more pond birds taken that day.<\/p>\n

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A male Common Goldeneye that surprised me (we surprised each other) when he swam out from behind some shoreline vegetation. He quickly skedaddled.<\/p>\n

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The only male Redhead on the pond came in close a single time.<\/p>\n

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This Mallard drake and his mate were flying about 30′ above the pond when the female suddenly dropped almost straight down and landed on the water. This flight posture was his reaction as he tried to follow her, also nearly straight down. I like his posture.<\/p>\n

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But I had my most consistent luck with cormorants.<\/p>\n

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Same behavior, different angle.<\/p>\n

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Normally I’m not a fan of other birds photobombing my shots but for some reason I like this one. It almost looks like the cormorant is reacting to the close presence of the Redhead. Maybe it was.<\/p>\n

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I love the bejeweled eyes of cormorants this time of year.<\/p>\n

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Near the end of my stay at the pond, this Osprey made one pass over the water and then disappeared. I’d been photographing other birds so I wouldn’t have seen the Osprey if hadn’t noticed a couple of hikers looking skyward at something, which turned out to be the Osprey. I didn’t get any photos that were very good, but I was excited to see my first Osprey of the year.<\/p>\n

Most of the birds in today’s post are pretty typical pond birds but because of my vehicle issues it had been 19 days since I’d been out shooting so they helped to scratch my birding itch. For which I’m grateful.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – In case you’re curious, yesterday I took the advice of several of my readers and ordered prints of both birds,<\/a><\/span><\/span> (Short-eared Owl and Burrowing Owl),<\/a><\/span><\/span> to hang in my new camping trailer. I plan to rotate them. I knew there was good reason to ask for advice from my readers. I hadn’t considered the option of printing them both before I asked for help.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Including my first Osprey of the year. (10 photos of five species)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167421,"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":[91,7773,1901,213,240,7772],"class_list":["post-167412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-common-goldeneye","tag-cormorant-bejeweled-eye","tag-double-crested-cormorant","tag-mallard","tag-osprey","tag-redhead-duck"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/mallard-6300-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Hyc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167412","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=167412"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167464,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167412\/revisions\/167464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}