{"id":28617,"date":"2014-12-28T06:49:32","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T13:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=28617"},"modified":"2014-12-28T06:49:32","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T13:49:32","slug":"green-tailed-towhees-singing-on-territory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/28\/green-tailed-towhees-singing-on-territory\/","title":{"rendered":"Green-tailed Towhees Singing On Territory"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don’t see many quality photos of Green-tailed Towhees, for which there’s a very good reason.<\/p>\n

This is a shy and secretive species, to the point that they’re among North America’s least well-known birds.\u00a0 Because of their secretive nature and their tendency to spend most of their time on the ground buried in thick, shrubby habitats we know little of their life history or ecology.\u00a0 They’re simply\u00a0an extremely challenging species to study.<\/p>\n

For the same reasons they’re quite difficult to photograph.\u00a0 The photographer’s best chance for success is with breeding males that can become conspicuous when singing on territory from elevated perches.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve only had two reasonably close opportunities to photograph the species and this bird provided one of them.\u00a0 I found him in July of 2013 up Bountiful Canyon along Skyline Drive.\u00a0 His hormones were obviously flowing\u00a0so he was unusually brave at my presence.\u00a0 He gave me a few frontal shots like this and then…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

he flew to another perch only a few feet away and began singing his little heart out.\u00a0 I suspect there may have been another male nearby.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"green-tailed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

A little over two months earlier I photographed this singing male in the Stansbury Mountains.\u00a0 Though he didn’t allow me a close approach the light and angle on the bird\u00a0provided a great look at his namesake green tail.<\/p>\n

For those with an interest in hearing (and seeing) what I did with these two singing males here’s a link to a video clip <\/a>of two of them singing on territory.\u00a0 It’s a sound I hear fairly often but I rarely see its source.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

We don’t see many quality photos of Green-tailed Towhees, for which there’s a very good reason.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28619,"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":[334,1440],"tags":[2358,1441,211,1442,284,870,294,311],"class_list":["post-28617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-green-tailed-towhees","tag-bountiful-canyon","tag-green-tailed-towhee","tag-male","tag-pipilo-chlorurus","tag-singing","tag-skyline-drive","tag-stansbury-mountains","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/green-tailed-towhee-2158-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7rz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28617","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=28617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}