{"id":27339,"date":"2014-10-17T06:19:11","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T12:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=27339"},"modified":"2014-10-17T06:19:11","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T12:19:11","slug":"a-digestive-surprise-for-a-young-swainsons-hawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/17\/a-digestive-surprise-for-a-young-swainsons-hawk\/","title":{"rendered":"A Digestive Surprise For A Young Swainson’s Hawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe this juvenile Swainson’s Hawk was taken by surprise by what it found in its mouth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I photographed this beautiful hawk in early September of this year in Montana’s Centennial Valley.\u00a0 Here the bird has just completed landing on the fencepost and has barely folded its wings again and is\u00a0about to stand erect.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At that point I made the unfortunate decision to remove my 1.4 teleconverter (tc) so I would be less likely to clip or cut off any body parts when it took off again.\u00a0 If I hadn’t done so I’d have had better detail in the images that follow.<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0 Photographers may be interested in comparing these first two images to get a sense of the difference (in magnification)\u00a0made by the teleconverter.\u00a0 I used the tc on the first image but not on the second.\u00a0 Both images have been cropped by the same amount (50% of the original image) and my shooting angle and distance to the subject\u00a0are the same in both shots.\u00a0 You may also notice the difference in background bokeh provided by the increased magnification.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ok, back to the point of this post…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Suddenly the hawk opened its mouth in what I assumed would be\u00a0a behavior that I’ve seen and photographed many times before, one that very often precedes the casting of a pellet (you can see the entire process of pellet casting by a Swainson’s Hawk here<\/a> if you’re interested).<\/p>\n

But this\u00a0time both the bird and I were in for a surprise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The hawk reached up to its mouth with its left foot and pulled this<\/em> out!\u00a0 I can only assume it’s the small intestine of rodent prey that had been in its crop.\u00a0 One\u00a0part of the intestine (or whatever it is) was looped between two of its toes and the bird struggled with\u00a0it by pulling down, hard, with its left foot until…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0one of the two strands broke.\u00a0 Then it pulled some more until…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0the other strand broke and snapped back into its face.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

At that point the hawk swallowed it all again.<\/p>\n

If my assumption is correct that the food item was mammalian (or at least vertebrate) intestine then I’m slightly surprised because I’d been watching this bird for days and virtually all I’d seen it eat was grasshoppers (though I know they also consume rodents and other prey, especially during the breeding season).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In fact, only 6 minutes earlier I had photographed one of the parents of the young bird as it struggled with and eventually ate this small snake.\u00a0 As to why the juvenile pulled the intestine? out of its crop, well… I’m stumped.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps some of my readers (falconers or rehabbers perhaps)\u00a0can provide some insight.\u00a0 It’s definitely something that I had never seen before.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I believe this juvenile Swainson’s Hawk was taken by surprise by what it found in its mouth.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27344,"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":[5,6,334,395,1493,360,645],"tags":[1828,59,2064,903,817,190,220,245,256,263,1494,646,671],"class_list":["post-27339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-1-4-teleconverter","tag-bokeh","tag-centennail-valley","tag-crop","tag-grasshoppers","tag-juvenile","tag-montana-2","tag-pellet","tag-prey","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-snake","tag-swainsons-hawk","tag-throw-up"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/swainsons-hawk-3520-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-76X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27339","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=27339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120594,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27339\/revisions\/120594"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}