{"id":21215,"date":"2014-01-07T06:29:39","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T13:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=21215"},"modified":"2014-01-07T06:46:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T13:46:57","slug":"western-meadowlark-in-the-snow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/07\/western-meadowlark-in-the-snow\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Meadowlark In The Snow"},"content":{"rendered":"

In northern Utah, anticipating how long our Western Meadowlarks will stick around during winter is always a guessing game.<\/p>\n

Migration patterns of this species are complex and\u00a0difficult to predict.\u00a0 Some birds simply\u00a0migrate from higher elevations during winter.\u00a0 Many\u00a0migrate south from mid\u00a0October through November but some of them will overwinter here during mild years.\u00a0 Interestingly, when they do migrate, research indicates that they\u00a0use the azimuth\u00a0(elevation) of the sun, corrected for time of day, to select compass direction\u00a0for migration.\u00a0 They become confused and disoriented on cloudy days.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"western<\/a>1\/2000, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I found this bird almost exactly a year ago (12\/28\/12)\u00a0as it\u00a0perched on a mix of rabbitbrush and sage that was covered with a thick layer of fresh snow on Antelope Island.\u00a0 This was the last meadowlark I photographed until the middle of the following March.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Given how brutal our weather was late last winter (January and February particularly) I hope this bird headed south very soon after this photo was taken.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen very few meadowlarks on the island (or any other songbirds for that matter) for weeks now so I suspect our early very cold temperatures prompted even the stragglers to move south a little early.\u00a0 I doubt if we’ll have many meadowlarks (that survive) overwintering this year.<\/p>\n

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

In northern Utah, anticipating how long our Western Meadowlarks will stick around during winter is always a guessing game.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21216,"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":[3,334,370],"tags":[31,1816,866,669,311,323],"class_list":["post-21215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-western-meadowlarks","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-azimuth","tag-migration","tag-sturnella-neglecta","tag-utah-2","tag-western-meadowlark"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/western-meadowlark-9670-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5wb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21215","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=21215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}