{"id":31198,"date":"2015-05-08T04:28:10","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T10:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=31198"},"modified":"2015-05-08T07:10:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T13:10:37","slug":"mating-swainsons-hawks-sequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/08\/mating-swainsons-hawks-sequence\/","title":{"rendered":"Mating Swainson’s Hawks Sequence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Five days ago I photographed\u00a0an entire mating sequence of a pair of Swainson’s Hawks in Beaverhead County, Montana. I’ve photographed mating raptors before but those series of images were short and the vantage point of the viewer was usually from the front or side. This time I got 93 images of the behavior from mostly behind the birds so some of the mating images are a little more clinical and have less eye contact but I think they show an interesting perspective on the behavior.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t particularly close to the hawks when it happened but that helped me to get both birds sharp. This is a large post of 15 images so I hope it hasn’t been annoyingly slow for some readers to load.<\/p>\n

Techs for most of these images were: 1\/1000 to 1\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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

It all began when I was photographing this male Swainson’s Hawk perched on an old fencepost. When he defecated I thought he might be about to take off but instead he began a short preening session…<\/p>\n

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

and then abruptly took off. In this situation with his direction of flight being away from me I’d normally drop my lens and watch the bird with my naked eye but for some reason this time I kept him in my viewfinder and suddenly…<\/p>\n

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

I could see that he was approaching another Swainson’s Hawk on a fencepost down the line, a bird\u00a0that I didn’t even know was there! At this point I thought the first bird might land near the second or even that there might be a fight so I just kept firing away and hoped I’d capture something interesting.<\/p>\n

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

But these birds had mating in mind. In some of the earlier images as the male approached the female she\u00a0had her head turned toward him and was calling to him but here she had\u00a0stopped calling and was bracing for him to land on her back.<\/p>\n

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

Touch down.<\/p>\n

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

Balance is always precarious for both birds\u00a0in these situations but especially for the male. Even with her obvious assistance he struggled to stay on her back.<\/p>\n

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

Here she begins to present her cloacal opening as the male gets into position for sperm transfer.<\/p>\n

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

Contact between cloacal openings of male and female birds for sperm transfer\u00a0is commonly called the “cloacal kiss”.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to note that some male birds (ostriches, cassowaries, kiwi, geese and some swans and ducks) have an intromittent organ (penis) to facilitate sperm transfer and possibly prevent water from washing the sperm away during copulation. Raptors lack such an organ.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Here we get a good look at the cloacal opening of the female just after the male pulled his tail away. Successful sperm transfer may not have occurred on this first attempt because…<\/p>\n

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

they apparently made cloacal contact…<\/p>\n

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

several more times…<\/p>\n

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

before the male pushed off…<\/p>\n

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

and flew away.<\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

I thought some might appreciate a better look at both birds (both images taken soon after mating). The female is a light morph…<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

and the male is an intermediate morph (note the extensive rufous color on his breast and belly). I now know where their nest is (I never approach raptor nests but I’ve seen this one far off from the road) and later this summer\u00a0after the presumed chicks fledge I’ll be interested in seeing what color phase(s) the youngsters turn out to be.<\/p>\n

A couple of these images may be a little\u00a0too clinical for some and if so I apologize. But with my biology\/zoology background and\u00a0deep interest in bird behavior this series of images is right up my alley.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Five days ago I photographed an entire mating sequence of a pair of Swainson’s Hawks in Beaverhead County, Montana.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31202,"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":[334,1493,391,645],"tags":[779,647,477,137,1605,1017,1472,211,1016,220,1018,2488,646],"class_list":["post-31198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-nesting-and-mating","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-beaverhead-county","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-cloacal-kiss","tag-female","tag-intermediate-morph","tag-intromittent-organ","tag-light-morph","tag-male","tag-mating","tag-montana-2","tag-penis","tag-phallus","tag-swainsons-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/swainsons-hawk-6634-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-87c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31198","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=31198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133377,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31198\/revisions\/133377"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}