{"id":170203,"date":"2025-11-25T06:51:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T13:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170203"},"modified":"2025-11-25T07:57:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T14:57:13","slug":"black-billed-magpie-showing-off-its-many-colors-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/25\/black-billed-magpie-showing-off-its-many-colors-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Black-billed Magpie Showing Off Its Many Colors In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning, while playing cat and mouse games with a shy Spotted Towhee, I saw a Black-billed Magpie land behind my pickup where I had no chance to photograph it. So, I went back to looking for the towhee. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the magpie had taken off and was looping and swooping across the pond.<\/p>\n

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By the time I got ‘him’ in focus he wasn’t very close and he was past me but he was tilted at an angle that gave me a good look at his entire dorsal surface. And it was about to get better.<\/p>\n

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In the next shot, with just a few more degrees of tilt, his iridescent colors began to light up. A photobombing Mallard seemed to be enjoying them too.<\/p>\n

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When he flared prior to landing on the bank of the pond, he was at the perfect angle to make most of his hidden colors light up. I really like the rainbow colors at the tip of his magnificent tail.<\/p>\n

The Mallard was still there at the bottom of the uncropped frame, but I had just enough room to crop him out and still get a composition that works for me.<\/p>\n

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This is the last shot I got before he disappeared behind the shoreline vegetation and landed on the bank.<\/p>\n

The magpie was past me so these are semi-butt shots but with magpies, given the structure of magpie feathers and the laws of physics, that’s often what it takes to get their iridescent colors to pop. It’s a tradeoff I’m more than willing to make.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Magpies have more colors than just black and white, but we usually don’t see them. (4 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170206,"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":[334,363],"tags":[57,146,4083,311],"class_list":["post-170203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-black-billed-magpies","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-flight","tag-iridescent-colors","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/black-billed-magpie-0469-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Ihd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170203","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=170203"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170231,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170203\/revisions\/170231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}