{"id":22865,"date":"2014-03-26T05:43:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T11:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=22865"},"modified":"2014-03-26T05:55:08","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T11:55:08","slug":"mating-red-tailed-hawks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/26\/mating-red-tailed-hawks\/","title":{"rendered":"Mating Red-tailed Hawks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the first time I’ve been able to photograph mating buteos in the wild.<\/p>\n

We were driving along a dirt road in the mountains of Tooele County when we spotted two adult Red-tailed Hawks perched next to each other\u00a0on top of a juniper tree on a hilltop high\u00a0above us.\u00a0 By the time I got the pickup stopped and my lens out the window one of the birds was in the air and I didn’t know which hawk to focus on – the one\u00a0already\u00a0in flight or the other one\u00a0for take-off shots.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

But very soon that decision was made for me as the male in flight came back\u00a0in to mate with the waiting female who had never left the tree.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

She hunkered down and waited for him to land on her back.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

Which he did.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

Here the red tail of the female is twisted to the side to allow copulation.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

The actual act was very quick.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

Immediately after mating the male lifted his wings…<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

and vacated the premises.\u00a0 Here, except for part of her tail the female is almost completely hidden.<\/p>\n

But the male wasn’t through yet…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

The female remained on the perch and to my surprise the male returned nine minutes later\u00a0for another go at it.<\/p>\n

Note: you may notice a slight change in perspective here because by now I had\u00a0driven about 40′ down the road to try to improve the light angle a bit.\u00a0 Here the incoming male isn’t very sharp because I was focused on the female.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

At first it seemed that the previous scenario was about to replay itself.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

But this was as close as the male got to landing on her back.\u00a0 For some reason at this point he…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

changed his mind and flew off without mating with her a second time.<\/p>\n

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\"red-tailed<\/a><\/p>\n

Here one of the hawks is soaring overhead after both\u00a0of them had left the juniper.<\/p>\n

Due to poor light angles, the perch being high above me and in some cases “operator error”, the quality of many these images is mediocre but I was able to document a behavior that was new to me as a photographer and I couldn’t be happier about that.<\/p>\n

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

Yesterday was the first time I’ve been able to photograph mating buteos in the wild.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22874,"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":[334,391,450],"tags":[452,1016,451,1357,311],"class_list":["post-22865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-mating","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-tooele-county","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/red-tailed-hawk-0772-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5WN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22865","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=22865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}