{"id":17483,"date":"2013-08-06T04:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T10:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=17483"},"modified":"2013-08-07T11:04:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-07T17:04:00","slug":"intermediate-morph-swainsons-hawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/06\/intermediate-morph-swainsons-hawk\/","title":{"rendered":"Intermediate Morph Swainson’s Hawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the third of my series of four posts on color morphs of the Swainson’s Hawk that I photographed on my last trip to Montana late last month.\u00a0 Todays bird is an intermediate morph.<\/p>\n

The three morph categories\u00a0are\u00a0convenient to use but\u00a0color variation of Swainson’s Hawks\u00a0is almost continuous from darker to lighter individuals so the morph categories are somewhat arbitrary.\u00a0 I sometimes struggle with\u00a0feeling confident\u00a0about which\u00a0category a particular bird belongs in.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Overall, more than 90% of Swainson’s Hawks are light morphs\u00a0(though in some areas the darker morphs are significantly more common than\u00a010%)\u00a0so I was happy to find this darker bird on a fence post in Beaverhead County.\u00a0 Notice that the solid dark color of the breast is more mottled and rufous on the belly.<\/p>\n

As per my usual strategy in cases like this I took a few shots with my teleconverter attached and then removed it for possible take-off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I\u00a0 expected\u00a0the hawk to take off to my left but it fooled me and went to my right so I was lucky to get it in frame.<\/p>\n

Some of my readers know much more about these morph variations than I do so any additions or corrections on this series would be welcomed.<\/p>\n

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

This is the third of my series of four posts on color morphs of the Swainson’s Hawk that I photographed on my last trip to Montana late last month. Todays bird is an intermediate morph.<\/p>\n

The three morph categories are convenient to use but color variation of Swainson’s Hawks is almost continuous from darker to lighter individuals so the morph categories are somewhat arbitrary. I sometimes struggle with feeling confident about which category a particular bird belongs in.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17485,"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":[334,1493,645],"tags":[647,1605,220,646],"class_list":["post-17483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-intermediate-morph","tag-montana-2","tag-swainsons-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/swainsons-hawk-3021-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4xZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17483","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=17483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}