{"id":170521,"date":"2026-01-08T06:02:27","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T13:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170521"},"modified":"2026-01-08T08:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T15:10:16","slug":"after-a-long-absence-the-leucistic-red-winged-blackbird-is-showing-up-in-my-yard-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/08\/after-a-long-absence-the-leucistic-red-winged-blackbird-is-showing-up-in-my-yard-again\/","title":{"rendered":"After A Long Absence The Leucistic Red-winged Blackbird Is Showing Up In My Yard Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

The same leucistic<\/a><\/span> male Red-winged Blackbird has made sporadic appearances at my feeders for about three years. Unlike most birds, and most blackbirds in particular, he’s easy to identify as an individual because most of the primary feathers and a single secondary feather on his left wing are pure white. And those same feathers remain white from year to year, including through every molt.<\/p>\n

When he’s with other blackbirds, as he usually is, he stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.<\/p>\n

Two days ago, and the day before that, I saw him at my feeders again for the first time in many months.<\/p>\n

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He brings other blackbirds when he comes but all of them are exremely shy so the only way I can photograph them is through the dirty glass of my patio door. So nearly all of my photos of him are of poor quality but they document an unusual bird that I’ve become quite fond of.<\/p>\n

Here he’s squabbling with other blackbirds at my cylinder feeder.<\/p>\n

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When his wings are folded it can be hard to see his white feathers so I usually try to photograph him in flight with his left side toward me, which isn’t easy. This is about the best I’ve been able to do.<\/p>\n

I hope to see him occasionally throughout the winter. If he follows his usual pattern, he’ll completely disappear during the breeding season. I presume that’s because Red-winged Blackbirds switch to eating mostly insects and spiders that time of year.<\/p>\n

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It irritates me to have only poor-quality photos in a blog post so…<\/p>\n

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I’ll provide an update on my attempts to photograph the female Belted Kingfisher that hangs out near the Jordan River.<\/p>\n

Here she’s fishing from a twig that hangs out over the water in the early morning before the sun came up over the mountains behind her. At first glance she looks like she’s leaning over so far to her right that it looks like she’s about to topple over into the water. But if you look closely, you’ll see that her feet are pretty much directly below her center of gravity.<\/p>\n

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Here she’s diving on a fish in much better light with a setting and background I like. I rarely get her in a flight posture like this with her wings in front of her.<\/p>\n

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Blog followers should know that my primary computer is in the shop with what will probably turn out to be a deceased hard drive. Thankfully, I save my photos elsewhere, so I haven’t lost them. But I’ll likely lose their organization so finding individual photos will be a nightmare for a while.<\/p>\n

For reasons I won’t go into, it’s far from easy to publish blog posts from my highly temperamental laptop, which I’m trying to do now.<\/p>\n

We’ll see how that goes when I hit the “Publish” button.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: I think I just now solved my “temperamental laptop” problem. The touchpad is highly sensitive and when I’m typing my thumbs keep brushing the touchpad and making my cursor jump around, which causes real mayhem to whatever I’m trying to type or do. So… I just disabled the touchpad. <\/em><\/p>\n

No loss, I hate touchpads anyway. I use a mouse instead.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Plus some more kingfisher photos (4 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170529,"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":[2853,5,334,395,390],"tags":[7277,7907,7436,311],"class_list":["post-170521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-red-winged-blackbirds","tag-female-belted-kingfisher","tag-leucism-in-birds","tag-leucistic-male-red-winged-blackbird","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/rred-winged-blackbird-4056-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Iml","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170521","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=170521"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170570,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170521\/revisions\/170570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}