{"id":27758,"date":"2014-11-06T05:57:05","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T12:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=27758"},"modified":"2014-11-06T05:57:05","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T12:57:05","slug":"swainsons-hawk-up-close-and-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/06\/swainsons-hawk-up-close-and-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Swainson’s Hawk Up Close And In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

This juvenile Swainson’s Hawk had no fear.\u00a0 I believe it thought of vehicles (and their contents)\u00a0as no more threatening than the boulders or trees that\u00a0are common in this area of the Centennial Valley.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon 100-400 @ 160mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The bird would fly from fencepost to fencepost right next to the dirt\u00a0road, seemingly just for the\u00a0fun of it\u00a0and there were times when it flew even\u00a0closer to me rather than further away.\u00a0 Its only concern seemed to be the ubiquitous grasshoppers that it would occasionally go after near the fence line but it didn’t even do that very often.\u00a0 Here the hawk is flying from one post to another one\u00a0that is significantly closer to me than\u00a0the\u00a0post it just left.\u00a0 Sometimes vehicles would slowly\u00a0pass between me and the perched\u00a0bird (within perhaps 15′ of the hawk) and it wouldn’t even flinch.<\/p>\n

I remember\u00a0thinking that I was glad that this was a remote\u00a0wildlife refuge (Red Rock Lakes NWR) where it was unlikely that any harm would come to the bird before it learned a healthy respect and even fear of anything associated with man.\u00a0 The dirt road in this area is rough and vehicles invariably travel it slowly but that’s not the case with most roads.\u00a0 Swainson’s Hawks sometimes deliberately land on roads\u00a0to hunt grasshoppers drawn to the road by the heat of the pavement and that puts them in harm’s way from speeding vehicles.<\/p>\n

I hope this young bird wised up a little before it headed south to spend the winter in Argentina.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note #1:\u00a0 The composition of this image (taken two months ago)\u00a0is less than ideal but I had no more room in the frame to the right.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note #2:\u00a0 I still have no images to share taken with the new Canon 7D Mark ll.\u00a0 The camera spent all day yesterday in the shop being calibrated to my lens and teleconverter.\u00a0 Hopefully, soon…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This juvenile Swainson’s Hawk had no fear. I believe it thought of vehicles (and their contents) as no more threatening than the boulders or trees that are common in this area of the Centennial Valley.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27759,"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":[334,1493,360,645],"tags":[647,2299,2280,555,817,220,263,646],"class_list":["post-27758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-calibration","tag-canon-7d-mark-ll","tag-centennial-valley","tag-grasshoppers","tag-montana-2","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-swainsons-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/swainsons-hawk-3657-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7dI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27758","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=27758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}