{"id":17043,"date":"2013-07-19T04:00:22","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T10:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=17043"},"modified":"2013-07-19T04:46:29","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T10:46:29","slug":"green-tailed-towhee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/19\/green-tailed-towhee\/","title":{"rendered":"Green-tailed Towhee"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago I’ve been after quality images of the Green-tailed Towhee for years but they’ve always eluded me.\u00a0 This species\u00a0has a special\u00a0place in my heart and memory because\u00a0it was my field project\u00a0study\u00a0species back in 1969 when I took a college ornithology class\u00a0at the University of Utah from the legendary Dr. William H. Behle.\u00a0 That class provided the\u00a0inspiration for my almost life-long love\u00a0of birds.\u00a0 I’ve been trying to get some nice images of them\u00a0for years now but their secretive nature and my bad luck always got in the way.<\/p>\n

This past May I did get a few\u00a0fairly good images but I was too far away from the bird\u00a0for good detail.\u00a0 I posted about that bird here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, cloned two leaf tips poking into frame edge<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

But yesterday morning my luck changed for the better on a back road drive to Bountiful Peak (elevation 9259 feet)\u00a0on the rough, dusty and beautiful Skyline Drive.\u00a0 This bird let us get close while it was on a nice perch and in good light and it was cooperative for almost two minutes.<\/p>\n

There are lots of things you can screw up when you’re photographing birds and screw up I did on the first shots where the bird was facing me.\u00a0 These towhees are long-tailed and since the tail of this bird was in the shade and largely hidden\u00a0I didn’t pay much attention to it when I was composing the shot.\u00a0 The result – a cut off tail.\u00a0 You can see it, out of focus and shaded as it disappears at the bottom of the frame.\u00a0 Lesson learned, once again…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised to get this shot.\u00a0 I was really too close for take-off shots (it happens so fast you normally need to leave plenty of room in the frame for them to fly into or you clip something) so I had actually changed my f\/stop to 7.1 to give me more depth of field for the perch which sacrificed some shutter speed.<\/p>\n

But suddenly the bird pooped.\u00a0 That can be an indicator of imminent take-off (even in songbirds) so I\u00a0made an instantaneous decision and\u00a0fired off a burst.\u00a0\u00a0 Sure enough, the towhee took off during the burst\u00a0and I was able get an early shot of the process.\u00a0\u00a0 This\u00a0image is almost full-frame so you can see that\u00a0I had very little wiggle room.\u00a0 My setting adjustment caused some motion blur in the wings but I’m ok with that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Surprisingly, when the towhee took off it only went a short distance, landed\u00a0and then proceeded to sing.<\/p>\n

We had a fun morning on the mountain – saw a few birds, enjoyed many spectacular views, encountered deer, two moose and a variety of ground squirrels.\u00a0 And the company was great, as always.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

As I mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago I’ve been after quality images of the Green-tailed Towhee for years but they’ve always eluded me. This species has a special place in my heart and memory because it was my field project study species back in 1969 when I took a college ornithology class at the University of Utah from the legendary Dr. William H. Behle. That class provided the inspiration for my almost life-long love of birds. I’ve been trying to get some nice images of them for years now but their secretive nature and my bad luck always got in the way.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17045,"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":[6,334,1440],"tags":[1582,1385,1441,1386,1442,870,1387],"class_list":["post-17043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-green-tailed-towhees","tag-bountiful-peak","tag-dr-william-h-behle","tag-green-tailed-towhee","tag-ornithology","tag-pipilo-chlorurus","tag-skyline-drive","tag-university-of-utah"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/green-tailed-towhee-2134-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4qT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17043","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=17043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}