{"id":25680,"date":"2014-08-07T05:39:14","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T11:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=25680"},"modified":"2014-08-07T06:03:02","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T12:03:02","slug":"eastern-kingbird-adult-and-chick-a-question-of-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/07\/eastern-kingbird-adult-and-chick-a-question-of-behavior\/","title":{"rendered":"Eastern Kingbird Adult And Fledgling – A Question Of Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning at Farmington Bay I photographed a subtle but interesting bit of kingbird behavior that caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.<\/p>\n

The photos are of documentary quality only.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

This recently fledged juvenile Eastern Kingbird was waiting in a tree as it watched its parent hunting nearby.\u00a0 Whenever the adult came relatively close with an offering\u00a0the younger bird\u00a0would begin to beg.\u00a0 As it waited it flew from branch to branch and I didn’t always have an unobstructed view of the proceedings but in one\u00a0sequence I was able to document the behavior fairly clearly when the parent brought in a large dragonfly for the youngster to gobble down.<\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

It wasn’t an easy meal to swallow and the young bird struggled with it.<\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

The adult watched the attempt at swallowing very carefully…<\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

and when it saw that the fledgling was having difficulties it moved up on the branch, actually sharing the same perch-space with the young bird.<\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

Eventually\u00a0(the swallowing process was a slow one)\u00a0the adult even nibbled at the gape of its offspring.<\/p>\n

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\"eastern<\/p>\n

When\u00a0the last of the\u00a0dragonfly had finally passed the bill-tip of the fledgling the adult backed off and once the insect had completely\u00a0disappeared from view it flew off to hunt some more.<\/p>\n

I was interested by how “in your face” the\u00a0parent was during the swallowing process and by the fact that the adult actually nibbled at the youngsters beak\u00a0as it tried to swallow the food.\u00a0 The\u00a0same behavior did not occur when the food item was smaller and easier to get down.\u00a0 I highly doubt that the parent was trying to steal the insect\u00a0away from its offspring so I wondered if the behavior was a form of encouragement –\u00a0 perhaps it triggers renewed effort at swallowing, especially after the competition for\u00a0food that occurs with siblings in the nest.<\/p>\n

Just another one of the “little things” that\u00a0I wonder about.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Yesterday morning at Farmington Bay I photographed a subtle but interesting bit of kingbird behavior that caught my attention and piqued my curiosity.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25682,"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":[334,598,392],"tags":[50,2149,600,1008,136,145,190,2150,601],"class_list":["post-25680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-eastern-kingbirds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-behavior","tag-dragonfly","tag-eastern-kingbird","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-feeding","tag-fledgling","tag-juvenile","tag-odonata","tag-tyrannus-tyrannus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/eastern-kingbird-7772-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-6Gc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25680","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=25680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}