{"id":170858,"date":"2026-02-24T06:24:16","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T13:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170858"},"modified":"2026-02-24T09:55:38","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T16:55:38","slug":"yesterday-mornings-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/24\/yesterday-mornings-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday Morning’s Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning began with a Great Blue Heron and ended with a trip to the liquor store to buy a bottle of vermouth – thanks to birds and the power of suggestion. Ravenous robins and starlings filled up my time in-between.<\/p>\n

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I’ve taken hundreds of photos of this Great Blue Heron over the last few months but this one stood out because of the unusual wing position just prior to takeoff. The heron was in pretty deep water so the deployment of those huge wings was restricted by water below and by vegetation directly behind them. This momentary posture was the result.<\/p>\n

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This is the next photo in the burst as the heron began to raise its wings straight up. I was so close to the bird I cut off one or both wings in all of the rest of the takeoff and flight shots.<\/p>\n

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The rest of my morning with birds was taken up mostly by ravenous American Robins eating olives. There were dozens of robins and a few starlings in a clump of Russian Olive trees and they were all hungry after a long, cold night. So I had great fun for nearly 45 minutes trying to photograph them as they performed gymnastics while trying to pick off olives. The robins in particular were pretty picky about which olives they chose, which added to the fun for me.<\/p>\n

With all those olives to choose from, this robin has just spotted the ones ‘he’ wanted, circled in red.<\/p>\n

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Taking off after them.<\/p>\n

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The next photo in the burst.<\/p>\n

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Here it may look like he’s about to land on the twig directly in front of his feet but in reality his destination is the larger, thicker twig to the right of that one. The olives he’s after are in the upper right corner. Because of the busy setting I lost focus on him in the landing shot and by the time I acquired focus on him again he had…<\/p>\n

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already picked off one of the olives.<\/p>\n

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Here’s another robin picking off an olive that was very hard to get. While this bird had been perched upright there were many olives right in front of his face but the bird wanted this one. I wish I knew what makes them prefer one similar olive over another.<\/p>\n

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This is the same robin after harvesting that “special” olive. Little did he know, he was about to lose it due to circumstances beyond his control.<\/p>\n

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About a second later a brouhaha broke out in the background that demanded his attention. Can you tell what’s going on back there and who’s involved?<\/p>\n

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The next shot in the burst shows the combatants, a robin and a starling, a little more clearly. At this point I’m pretty sure he still had the olive in his bill.<\/p>\n

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But a split second later he dropped the precious olive when he felt threatened by another robin, whose wingtip can be seen at the right side of the frame.<\/p>\n

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I spent a lot of time trying to photograph robins and starlings taking off and\/or in flight but the setting was so busy with twigs and olives I didn’t have a lot of luck.<\/p>\n

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This is the best I did with the starlings.<\/p>\n

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The starlings were almost as gymnastically creative as the robins while trying to reach preferred olives but I could never get light in their eyes while they were doing it. That happened…<\/p>\n

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repeatedly. Notice that the starling’s head is turned 180\u00b0 from its body<\/p>\n

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While waiting for one of the robins or starlings to come out in the relative open I had a lot of time to think about “stuff” and one thing that came to mind was the shrimp scampi I was planning on having for dinner last night.<\/p>\n

One thing led to another in my wandering mind – from olives, to martinis (which I hate), to gin (which I also hate – might as well drink gasoline) to vermouth. I like my shrimp scampi made with dry white wine but I realized that the only white wine I had had been opened months ago and would no longer be good. I had recently learned that vermouth (a dry white wine) keeps for much longer than other wines when opened (especially when kept in the fridge) so the next thing I did after photographing birds eating olives was make a trip to the liquor store to purchase a bottle of vermouth.<\/p>\n

Thanks to birds eating olives, the power of suggestion and my convoluted mind making a somewhat strained progression, I had scampi made with vermouth for dinner last night. It was excellent.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – Here’s another thing we can thank birds for<\/a><\/span><\/span> – from NBC News this morning. Birds make us smarter, including older adults.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday morning began with a Great Blue Heron and ended with a trip to the liquor store to buy a bottle of vermouth – thanks to birds and the power of suggestion. (16 photos of three species)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170864,"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":[1734,334,5533,1094],"tags":[1735,7919,2344,712,7922,7921,7920,7923],"class_list":["post-170858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-robin","category-birds","category-european-starling","category-great-blue-herons","tag-american-robin-2","tag-birds-eating-olives","tag-european-starling","tag-great-blue-heron","tag-how-to-make-opened-wine-last-longer","tag-shrimp-scampi","tag-the-power-of-suggestion","tag-vermouth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/american-robin-8756-for-FB-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-IrM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170858","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=170858"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170925,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170858\/revisions\/170925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}