{"id":30369,"date":"2015-03-30T06:02:47","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T12:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=30369"},"modified":"2015-03-31T16:39:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T22:39:20","slug":"two-male-sage-grouse-fighting-on-the-lek-in-golden-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/30\/two-male-sage-grouse-fighting-on-the-lek-in-golden-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Male Sage Grouse Fighting On The Lek In Golden Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching Greater Sage-Grouse performing on a lek in a remote area of Wayne County, Utah yesterday morning was an experience I’ll never forget.\u00a0 Ever!<\/p>\n

But first a little background. Incredibly, on this\u00a0camping trip we independently found two active Sage Grouse leks but we never would have stumbled upon the first one without the encounter we had with\u00a0a lone female grouse<\/a> that we photographed on a hilltop Saturday morning. She was on the wrong side of the dirt road I was driving so we got out of my pickup, propped our long, heavy lenses on the vehicle and photographed her\u00a0from that position.\u00a0 The air was absolutely still\u00a0so soon after dawn\u00a0and the only sound was our shutters clicking\u00a0but then I heard another sound coming from far to the west. It was so faint that I wasn’t even sure that I’d heard it but then it happened again and I knew exactly what it was – the air sac popping sounds produced by strutting male Sage Grouse!<\/p>\n

These sounds are amplified by the air-filled esophageal pouches and some say they are reminiscent of the sound produced by the uncorking of champagne bottles. They can be heard here<\/a> if you’re interested.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I told Mia what I’d heard and she instantly said “let’s go” so we left the female on the hilltop and went looking for the presumed lek.\u00a0 And we actually found it at the end of a dirt track “road” that I’d most likely never have taken if I hadn’t noticed the direction the sound was coming from while we were photographing the female grouse.\u00a0Later I checked the distance from the spot where I’d first heard the sound to the lek and it was roughly\u00a0.7 mile as the crow flies.\u00a0BNA says that the\u00a0sound of performing\u00a0Sage Grouse can actually be heard from distances up to 5 km (3 miles).<\/p>\n

We watched and photographed the performing birds for a while but didn’t want to disturb them so we kept our distance and eventually when the performances were over the birds flew off individually and in small groups.<\/p>\n

The next morning (yesterday) we arrived at the lek while it was still dark and photographed them for an hour and 47 minutes.\u00a0We never got out of the vehicle or even started the engine to warm up a little (it was 21 F. and believe me\u00a0we almost froze – photography with long lenses while you’re shivering uncontrollably\u00a0isn’t easy).\u00a0And we waited until the birds in the area had left before we left ourselves.\u00a0We were the only humans at the lek and I never once saw any sign of disturbance or nervousness from the grouse.<\/p>\n

I took many hundreds of photos of the grouse but I still haven’t seen most of them so this morning I’ll present only one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"sage1\/2000, f\/5.6, ISO 4000, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Males competing at the lek often engage in Wing Fights and that’s what these two were doing – lashing out and smashing each other with their wings (you can see a few bits of flying debris above the bird on the left).\u00a0 As you can see this image was taken right at dawn and the light was very low and\u00a0had barely reached the birds so I had to really crank up the ISO to get enough shutter speed to freeze the action. It’s unheard of for me to use ISO’s as high as this but given the\u00a0conditions I was pleased with the performance of the relatively new Canon 7D Mark II.\u00a0 If the image had been taken with my older 7D I’d have likely deleted it.<\/p>\n

Sorry about all the text and only one\u00a0image in this post but I thought many readers might appreciate the background info.\u00a0 I’ll be posting more photos of these grouse and their behaviors down the road but as you can imagine I have my culling and processing work cut out for me before that can happen.<\/p>\n

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

Watching Greater Sage-Grouse performing on a lek in a remote area of Wayne County, Utah yesterday morning was an experience I’ll never forget. Ever!<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30372,"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":[334,394,1558,391],"tags":[2348,1560,140,2031,187,2183,959,311,1909,2450],"class_list":["post-30369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-greater-sage-grouse","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-canon-7d-mark-ii","tag-centrocercus-uophasianus","tag-fighting","tag-greater-sage-grouse-3","tag-iso","tag-lek","tag-noise","tag-utah-2","tag-wayne-county","tag-wing-fight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/greater-sage-grouse-3708b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7TP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30369","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=30369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}