{"id":170088,"date":"2025-11-11T06:11:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T13:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170088"},"modified":"2025-11-11T07:02:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T14:02:03","slug":"yesterday-i-got-some-american-kestrel-photos-i-like-a-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/11\/yesterday-i-got-some-american-kestrel-photos-i-like-a-lot\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday I Got Some American Kestrel Photos I Like A Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"

This little lady was unusually patient with me.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday morning I found this female American Kestrel perched in a Russian Olive tree near the Jordan River. I’m almost certain she’s a different female than the one I’ve been photographing lately with her mate. She was nearly 3\/4 of a mile from the area where that pair hangs out (the two areas are separated by a freeway) and, unlike the kestrel pair who nearly always hang out together, she was all by herself. For a long time.<\/p>\n

I like how the olive fruits are color coordinated with the bird.<\/p>\n

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She alternately spent her time hunting and grooming. Here she’s working on her left leg. I got lots of grooming shots but she usually had her eyes closed.<\/p>\n

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Then she did some stretching, here a tail spread with a vertical wing lift, and then…<\/p>\n

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she turned sideways to stretch her right wing downward with her tail fully flared and held at a 90\u00b0 angle to her body. That’s gotta hurt.<\/p>\n

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Then she surprised me.<\/p>\n

Larger falcons, like Peregrine Falcons and especially Prairie Falcons, often raise their wings up and hold them elevated for a few moments just before takeoff<\/a><\/em><\/span>. That’s something I rarely, if ever, see kestrels do. But this one did.<\/p>\n

Af first I thought she was stretching her wings again but she slowly raised them…<\/p>\n

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higher and higher and held them there for a few moments before…<\/p>\n

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taking off.<\/p>\n

Her spindly perch provided little support so when she pushed against it with her feet it mostly bent backwards rather than pushing her forward. That slowed her takeoff down so…<\/p>\n

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in the next shot she had barely moved forward as her perch sprang back into its natural position. I got two more flight shots of her but you won’t be seeing them because they weren’t quite sharp enough.<\/p>\n

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She didn’t go far – only about 20′, to the top of another olive tree where she spooked (deliberately?) a flock of small birds that had been perched there. They sounded like starlings but I’m not sure all of them were.<\/p>\n

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She looked pretty proud of herself for asserting her dominance and scaring off all those birds.<\/p>\n

She didn’t stay here long before flying off. I was hoping for more takeoff and flight shots I like but I guess she figured I had enough of those. When she took off she…<\/p>\n

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dived almost straight down behind her perch. Naturally there were tiny twigs right in front of her eye.<\/p>\n

Photos #7 and #8 above are some of my favorite kestrel takeoff shots ever. I suffered to get those two photos because I had to keep her in my viewfinder, while holding a hair trigger on my shutter button with my body twisted in an uncomfortable position in my pickup, for a full 21 minutes before she took off. It seemed like an eternity.<\/p>\n

It’s a gamble. Sometimes extended agony like that pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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This little lady was unusually patient with me. (11 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170096,"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":[340,334,395],"tags":[5601,146,7897,7898,511,311],"class_list":["post-170088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","tag-female-american-kestrel","tag-flight","tag-holding-wings-up-before-takeoff","tag-russian-olive-fruits","tag-stretching","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/american-kestrel-9481-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Ifm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170088","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=170088"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170133,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170088\/revisions\/170133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}