{"id":168579,"date":"2025-06-10T06:12:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T12:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168579"},"modified":"2025-06-10T07:08:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:08:40","slug":"some-mountain-birds-and-a-critter-from-yesterday-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/10\/some-mountain-birds-and-a-critter-from-yesterday-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Mountain Birds And A Critter From Yesterday Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hadn’t yet visited the Wasatch Mountains this year so yesterday morning I figured it was way past time to do so. It was a beautiful mountain morning and I encountered far less traffic and fewer “walkers” than I expected but I had mixed results with birds. I got some photos I like but every time the possibility of getting one of those “special” shots came around, my old friend Murphy put the kibosh on it. Something special wasn’t to be.<\/p>\n

But I thought a collection of some of the photos I like that included some of the “almosts” might be interesting to my readers as a representation of what my morning was like. The twelve photos below are my attempt at such a presentation.<\/p>\n

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The first bird I had a chance with was this Song Sparrow on a nearly vertical dead twig. I kept hoping “he” would break out into song but when he eventually did…<\/p>\n

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I never got his head in full profile.<\/p>\n

Don’t ask me why we can see the spider silk to the right and just below his head in this photo, but we can’t see it in the previous photo. Spider silk being spider silk, I guess.<\/p>\n

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A Black-billed Magpie taking off that I’d have liked much better if I’d been closer.<\/p>\n

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A young Uinta Ground Squirrel that was extremely reluctant to come out of its burrow. I waited a long time before…<\/p>\n

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‘he’ eventually came completely out except for anchoring his tail inside the burrow. Somehow he must have felt safer with his tail sticking down his hole like this. Maybe he was afraid of…<\/p>\n

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the killer chickens that were just down the road. Like many other birds that morning, the fiendish fowl never did come out where I could see them.<\/p>\n

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A male Black-chinned Hummingbird guarding his territory. This is the only hummer I saw or even heard that morning.<\/p>\n

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I love photographing warblers in flight but when this Yellow Warbler took off for a higher perch his entire flight path kept the nearly vertical branch in front of his eye. Ol’ Murph up to his old tricks.<\/p>\n

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A Gray Catbird that was as curious about me as I was about it.<\/p>\n

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When it took off the catbird took a trick from the warbler and kept twigs between us.<\/p>\n

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This American Goldfinch was feeding on seeds from a variety of spent wildflowers. This is as close as I ever got to the bird.<\/p>\n

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A male Green-tailed Towhee peering out at me from his secluded perch. This is the last bird I photographed that morning.<\/p>\n

At least I ended my morning with my spark bird<\/a><\/span><\/span>, where it all began.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Twelve photos of eight species.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168583,"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":[1757,57,2174,3525,1441,7824,290,2198,2588],"class_list":["post-168579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-american-goldfinch-2","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-black-chinned-hummingbird","tag-gray-catbird","tag-green-tailed-towhee","tag-killer-chickens","tag-song-sparrow","tag-uinta-ground-squirrel","tag-yellow-warbler"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/gray-catbird-4560-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HR1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168579","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=168579"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168624,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168579\/revisions\/168624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}