{"id":27770,"date":"2014-11-07T06:29:58","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T13:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=27770"},"modified":"2014-11-07T11:34:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T18:34:19","slug":"forsters-tern-with-prey-and-a-common-black-hawk-in-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/07\/forsters-tern-with-prey-and-a-common-black-hawk-in-utah\/","title":{"rendered":"Forster’s Tern With Prey And A Common Black-Hawk In Utah!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, readers get a “twofer”: a Forster’s Tern with prey and a rare Common Black-hawk.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/3200, 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><\/p>\n

I photographed this Forster’s Tern in early August as it was hunting at Glover’s Pond in Farmington.\u00a0 Here the bird is just emerging with prey after one of their patented and explosive dives into the water.\u00a0 I’ve cropped the image in a nontraditional manner to include part of\u00a0the depression in the water from the dive.\u00a0 These birds eat small fish almost exclusively but they also\u00a0consume some arthropods\u00a0and this prey item was so covered with mud that initially I couldn’t\u00a0tell what it was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/3200, 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><\/p>\n

\u00a0And the next frame doesn’t clear up the mystery either.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/3200, 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><\/p>\n

But when the angle of the prey was turned slightly\u00a0the\u00a0anal fins, pectoral fins and the tail of a small fish came into view.\u00a0 Though this bird wasn’t particularly close to me when it emerged I was happy to catch it with prey and get several images where the bird was sharp.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ok, now for a change of pace.\u00a0 I seldom post crappy images of birds just because they’re rare or unusual but I decided to make an exception this morning.\u00a0 Two days ago\u00a0Dennis Coleman reported an unusual hawk near the Bountiful, Utah\u00a0landfill (near Farmington Bay WMA) and once Jerry Liquori ID’d the bird as a juvenile Common Black-Hawk it created quite the stir in the birding community.\u00a0 Common Black-Hawks are rare even in their normal range (it’s estimated that there are fewer than 300 breeding pairs in the US) but a sighting here in northern Utah is a real attention-getter.\u00a0 Yesterday morning just prior to sunrise as\u00a0we were pulling into\u00a0Farmington Bay WMA\u00a0a Ubird email came in from Jeff Cooper saying that he’d already found the bird in the same general area as the day before so we abruptly changed plans and headed that way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"common<\/p>\n

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

The bird was tucked away under some olive trees on a fencepost with its back to me but that distinctive tail could occasionally be seen clearly.\u00a0 Adult birds have an unmistakable white median tail band but juveniles like this one have multiple contrasting dark and light tail bands.\u00a0 The hawk was much too distant for quality images (this is a large crop) and I was photographing with my lens pushed against the face of a chain link fence (shooting through the fence) so image quality was understandably lacking.<\/p>\n

Based on other images this bird did not appear to be banded.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"common<\/p>\n

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

This image is a little sharper and as you can see this Black-billed Magpie wasn’t very welcoming to our out-of-town\u00a0guest but the Black-Hawk simply ignored the bad manners.<\/p>\n

I had hoped to see one of these hawks on my recent trip to the Mojave Desert but came up empty.\u00a0 What a pleasant surprise to have one of them make the trip to come up and see us!<\/p>\n

Thank you, Dennis Coleman and Jeff Cooper!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: Adobe still hasn’t released a version of ACR that supports the new Canon 7D Mark ll (and\u00a0I’m uncomfortable\u00a0using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional for processing) so for now I’m shooting in both RAW and JPEG.\u00a0 These last two images were taken and entirely processed in JPEG.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Today, readers get a “twofer”: a Forster’s Tern with prey and a rare Common Black-hawk.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27773,"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":[334,392,1235],"tags":[57,2301,2280,2300,2303,1849,1045,141,714,2162,190,256,2302,1238,311],"class_list":["post-27770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-forsters-terns","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-buteogallus-anthracinus","tag-canon-7d-mark-ll","tag-common-black-hawk","tag-digital-photo-professional","tag-dive","tag-farmington","tag-fish","tag-forsters-tern","tag-glovers-pond","tag-juvenile","tag-prey","tag-rarity","tag-sterna-forsteri","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/forsters-tern-7424-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7dU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770","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=27770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}