{"id":18926,"date":"2013-10-02T06:20:52","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T12:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=18926"},"modified":"2013-10-02T06:20:52","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T12:20:52","slug":"bald-eagle-potpourri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/02\/bald-eagle-potpourri\/","title":{"rendered":"Bald Eagle Potpourri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning I saw my first Bald Eagle of the season at Farmington Bay.\u00a0 It was too far away for even mediocre images but it was there!\u00a0 We have a\u00a0small number of\u00a0resident eagles in northern Utah but those few birds normally don’t hang out at Farmington this\u00a0early in the season\u00a0so I’m not sure if it was a wandering resident or an early migrant.\u00a0 Either way it was a delight to see.<\/p>\n

As a result, when I began thinking about today’s post my mind kept returning to eagles so I thought I’d present several images taken at Farmington two winters ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

One of the nice things about photographing birds in flight at Farmington is that you can often get the Wasatch Mountains to the east in the background.\u00a0 The lighting on the bird can be a challenge but you often get an interesting backdrop.\u00a0\u00a0Here the mountains are covered with snow.\u00a0 I like the squared-off wing angles in this image.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0This bird was fighting with another eagle just above the surface of the ice.\u00a0 I’ve done some cloning in this version so…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

here’s the original.\u00a0 As you can see, this\u00a0eagle’s opponent is mostly out of frame at the top.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The competition for the invasive carp that have been killed by refuge personnel (as a means of preventing damage to emergent vegetation) is often\u00a0intense – from other eagles and from gulls.\u00a0 This eagle’s solution to the problem was to attempt to eat the carp “on the fly”.\u00a0 It’s not simply killing the fish (it was already dead) – it’s actually eating it in flight.\u00a0 Here it’s taking a chunk out of the head and if you look carefully you can see scales and debris falling below and slightly behind the bird.<\/p>\n

I’ve posted other images of this eagle with the carp but this one is new to my blog.<\/p>\n

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

Yesterday morning I saw my first Bald Eagle of the season at Farmington Bay. It was too far away for even mediocre images but it was there! We have a small number of resident eagles in northern Utah but those few birds normally don’t hang out at Farmington this early in the season so I’m not sure if it was a wandering resident or an early migrant. Either way it was a delight to see.<\/p>\n

As a result, when I began thinking about today’s post my mind kept returning to eagles so I thought I’d present several images taken at Farmington two winters ago.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18921,"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":[355,334,392,394],"tags":[43,74,134,1677,141,400,311],"class_list":["post-18926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bald-eagles","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-bald-eagle","tag-carp","tag-farmington-bay-wildlife-management-area","tag-figghting","tag-fish","tag-haliaeetus-leucocephalus","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/bald-eagle-4374-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4Vg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18926","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=18926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}