{"id":23570,"date":"2014-04-30T06:02:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T12:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=23570"},"modified":"2014-04-30T06:02:46","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T12:02:46","slug":"horned-larks-attending-to-domestic-duties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/30\/horned-larks-attending-to-domestic-duties\/","title":{"rendered":"Horned Larks Attending To Domestic Duties"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not easy to get photos of Horned Larks with insects in their beaks.\u00a0 The diet of adults of the species consists largely of seeds year-round but they do feed insects to their young so if you can catch them at the right time of year it’s possible to get photos of them with insects.\u00a0 Yesterday morning in the foothills of the Stansbury Mountains I photographed both a male and a female with insects in their beaks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"horned<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

I often stop to photograph Horned Larks in this same place alongside a paved rural road and occasionally the birds come in very close to perch on nearby rocks\u00a0but yesterday this female was too<\/em> close for the gear I was using.\u00a0 If I’d removed my teleconverter or swapped cameras I’d have missed the shots so I fired away anyway.\u00a0 She had a young grasshopper in her bill…<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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

and a large crop of the same image more clearly reveals that she also had a bunch of what appears to be insect eggs (along with a small twig).<\/p>\n

I\u00a0assumed that she was about to eat them but she fooled me when she scurried around very close to me\u00a0( I could barely see her through all the grass) and then suddenly\u00a0her beak was empty and she wasn’t moving.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"horned<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was at that point that I realized she was now\u00a0on the nest and had apparently given the food items to the chicks and then settled in to brood them.\u00a0 She was incredibly well hidden – here the patch of yellow under the throat and the eye ring are about the only things that give her presence away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"horned<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Then a few moments later this male flew in close and he was also carrying insects.\u00a0 I suspect him to be the mate of the female and thought he would deliver the food to the nest…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"horned<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

but instead he flew off.\u00a0 I liked the shot even though I severely clipped a wing.\u00a0 I wondered if\u00a0the reason he did so was because my pickup was so close (even though there’s regular traffic on this road) so we\u00a0left\u00a0to look\u00a0for other opportunities.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons I decided to do this post\u00a0is because of the documentation of nesting.\u00a0 I grew up on a farm in northwest Montana where Horned Larks are almost as thick as the ubiquitous mosquitoes, horse flies and deer flies and I return to the farm often but in all that time I had never stumbled across a Horned Lark nest that I can remember.\u00a0 Now I know why.\u00a0 This nest was so very well camouflaged that even though I knew exactly where it was,\u00a0when I looked away I couldn’t locate it again even with the bird on it.<\/p>\n

Talk about cryptic!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: In preparing this post I found conflicting information about the diet of adult Horned Larks.\u00a0 BNA Online says that adults eat “mostly seeds” during winter and during the breeding season but the American Museum of Natural History’s Birds of North America says\u00a0they eat “mostly insects in summer”.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not easy to get photos of Horned Larks with insects in their beaks. The diet of adults of the species consists largely of seeds year-round but they do feed insects to their young so if you can catch them at the right time of year it’s possible to get photos of them with insects. Yesterday morning in the foothills of the Stansbury Mountains I photographed both a male and a female with their beaks full of insects.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23574,"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":[334,354,391],"tags":[1995,107,124,824,174,837,228,294],"class_list":["post-23570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-horned-larks","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-cryptic","tag-diet","tag-eremophila-alpestris","tag-grasshopper","tag-horned-lark","tag-insects","tag-nest","tag-stansbury-mountains"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/horned-lark-7613-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-68a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23570","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=23570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}