{"id":17499,"date":"2013-08-07T04:00:37","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T10:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=17499"},"modified":"2013-08-06T18:15:29","modified_gmt":"2013-08-07T00:15:29","slug":"dark-morph-swainsons-hawk-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/07\/dark-morph-swainsons-hawk-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Morph Swainson’s Hawk And More"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the last in my four part series on the color morphs of the Swainson’s Hawk.\u00a0 Today the focus is on the dark morph.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

The body of the\u00a0adult dark morph is uniformly brown or rufous brown.\u00a0 I have very few images of the uncommon\u00a0dark morph\u00a0and those I do have were taken in poor light and are side views so it’s somewhat difficult to see that they lack the more rufous belly of the intermediate morph.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

This dark morph is turned slightly more toward the viewer than in\u00a0the previous image so it’s a little easier to see that dark brown belly.<\/p>\n

Both of these images were taken in July of last summer in the Centennial Valley.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u00a0thought it might be a little easier for the viewer to distinguish between the morphs and remember some of the differences if I had photos of each\u00a0of them together so that’s what I’ve done, below.\u00a0 But remember that\u00a0color variation in Swainson\u2019s Hawk morphs\u00a0is almost continuous from darker to lighter individuals so there would be a lot of in-between birds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainsons<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 LIGHT MORPH\u00a0JUVENILE\u00a0TRANSITIONING INTO A SUBADULT\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 LIGHT MORPH<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

INTERMEDIATE MORPH\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DARK MORPH<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Swainson’s Hawks are the most gregarious of all North American raptors and in summer may form very large flocks that forage together and use communal nocturnal roosts.\u00a0 This flock was flying over the Centennial Mountains on our last Montana trip.\u00a0 This is less than half of\u00a0the hawks that were in the group.\u00a0 I count about 30 birds in this image but we estimated at the time that there were roughly 70 of them, total – many were out of frame.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/2000\/ f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Earlier in this series I lamented the fact that although I’ve been successful in photographing Swainson’s Hawks in Montana this summer I’ve struck out with them here in Utah – until two days ago when I photographed this intermediate morph taking off out in the west desert.\u00a0\u00a0 The bird was slightly past me but perhaps this is a sign that I’ll have more luck with them before they leave us for the winter.<\/p>\n

Ok, enough of Swainson’s Hawks for a while.\u00a0 I’ve probably overdone them recently…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

This is the last in my four part series on the color morphs of the Swainson’s Hawk. Today the focus is on the dark morph.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17503,"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":[647,969,1605,1606,220,646,311],"class_list":["post-17499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-dark-morph","tag-intermediate-morph","tag-kettle","tag-montana-2","tag-swainsons-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/swainsons-hawk-8680-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4yf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17499","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=17499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}