{"id":20540,"date":"2013-12-09T06:48:32","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T13:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=20540"},"modified":"2013-12-09T07:22:20","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T14:22:20","slug":"dark-morph-rough-legged-hawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/09\/dark-morph-rough-legged-hawk\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Morph Rough-legged Hawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve only had two reasonably good chances at the dark morph of the Rough-legged Hawk and one of them was a highly unexpected encounter two weeks ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough-legged<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I was driving home from a morning of\u00a0photography at Farmington Bay and as usual at this point in the trip my camera was turned off, my lens hood cover was on, my camera\u00a0and lens\u00a0were safely secured in my handy-dandy\u00a0“lens caddy” next to me on the console, my window-mount “Noodle” wasn’t in place\u00a0and I had switched from\u00a0“shooting mode” to “driving mode”.\u00a0 I was on a busy 4 lane highway and only a quarter-mile from the entrance to Interstate 15 when I\u00a0turned a corner and spotted a beautiful dark raptor soaring toward me and it was already quite close.\u00a0 My\u00a0photo instincts took over – luckily there was a safe (legal?) place to pull over\u00a0and while I was\u00a0doing so I\u00a0got my gear in working order again and was able to fire off about a half-dozen shots (hand-held)\u00a0as the bird passed overhead.<\/p>\n

In yesterday’s post I did some serious complaining about bad luck and poor choices in my bird photography so this morning I’ll pay homage to the occasional fortuitous sets of circumstances that also present themselves once in a blue moon.\u00a0\u00a0On this occasion they included a relatively rare bird that was close to me in good light, a\u00a0place to park my pickup for a few seconds so I could take advantage of the situation and the fact that I spotted the bird while driving in the first place.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough-legged<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This is the only other dark Roughie I’ve ever been able to get reasonably good images of – a bird that hung around Antelope Island for a few days last November.<\/p>\n

I think the dark morph of the species is spectacular.\u00a0 I’m always on the lookout for them during winter and it’s loads of fun to finally encounter one of these striking and relatively unusual hawks.<\/p>\n

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

I’ve only had two reasonably good chances at the dark morph of the Rough-legged Hawk and one of them was a highly unexpected encounter two weeks ago.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20542,"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":[3,334,358],"tags":[31,534,397,269],"class_list":["post-20540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-rough-legged-hawks","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-buteo-lagopus","tag-farmington-bay","tag-rough-legged-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/rough-legged-hawk-5282-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5li","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20540","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=20540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}