{"id":28760,"date":"2015-01-04T06:19:54","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T13:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=28760"},"modified":"2015-01-04T17:42:47","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T00:42:47","slug":"kestrels-perch-in-the-oddest-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/04\/kestrels-perch-in-the-oddest-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Kestrels Perch In The Oddest Places"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Kestrels are primarily perch-hunters and they’re quite flexible in their choice of perches.<\/p>\n

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\"american<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2000. f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s few other birds that I’m aware of that have such a strong penchant for perching on the very tips of narrow, vertical snags or branches.\u00a0 They don’t need much space up there to get a foothold and there tends to be\u00a0few or no obstructions to block their view in all directions\u00a0of the hunting area below.<\/p>\n

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\"anerican<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200. 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

\u00a0But the chosen narrow, vertical perch can be almost anything.\u00a0 Here it’s a piece of rebar sticking up out of a piece of very old concrete.<\/p>\n

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\"american<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/4000, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two days ago while I was at Farmington Bay I was primarily the chauffeur as two close friends photographed birds from the two right-side windows of my pickup.\u00a0 As I drove up on this male kestrel I fired off a couple of quick shots and then turned my pickup to allow the others to photograph the little falcon from their side of my vehicle.<\/p>\n

As you can see once again the perch is narrow and vertical but it certainly isn’t a natural snag.\u00a0 Instead it’s…<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"american<\/p>\n

1\/1250, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> 17-85 @ 85mm, not baited set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

an antenna attached to the back of a hunter’s pickup parked at the 4-way at Farmington.\u00a0 I snapped this shot through my dirty windshield with one of my other cameras while my friends were photographing the bird with their larger lenses.\u00a0 The out of focus vertical dark line at left is my own antenna.<\/p>\n

You can clearly see what the Farmington dirt roads do to a clean truck in winter.\u00a0 Mine wasn’t (and still\u00a0isn’t) looking any better.<\/p>\n

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\"american1\/1250, f\/10, ISO 640, Canon 40D, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

The subject of todays post reminded me of this bird (I’ve posted the image before but it seems a natural here so I’ve included it again).<\/p>\n

There are two small bridges along the main road going south at Farmington.\u00a0 There’s a tall weather station at the second bridge that is apparently sensitive to the presence of perched birds so refuge personnel have placed two plastic Great Horned Owls at the top of the station in an attempt to keep birds off.\u00a0 You can see how well it works.\u00a0 This little male used to perch habitually on top of one of the owls which I’ve always thought was amusing.<\/p>\n

However, not all birds can see through the trickery.\u00a0 I once watched as a very aggressive Peregrine Falcon stooped on and attacked the two plastic owls for over 10 minutes.<\/p>\n

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\"peregrine<\/p>\n

It happened long ago, well\u00a0before I’d developed my long lens technique and the\u00a0Peregrine was\u00a0flying at speeds that approached\u00a0the speed of light\u00a0so the results aren’t pretty but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

Apparently some falcons are smarter than others…<\/p>\n

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

American Kestrels are primarily perch-hunters and they’re quite flexible in their choice of perches.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28761,"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":[340,334,582],"tags":[28,583,131,397,549,311],"class_list":["post-28760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-peregrine-falcons","tag-american-kestrel","tag-falco-peregrinus","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-farmington-bay","tag-perch","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/american-kestrel-0721-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7tS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28760","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=28760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}