{"id":31965,"date":"2015-06-15T05:18:31","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T11:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=31965"},"modified":"2015-06-15T05:18:31","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T11:18:31","slug":"male-cassins-finch-enjoying-a-dandelion-smorgasbord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/15\/male-cassins-finch-enjoying-a-dandelion-smorgasbord\/","title":{"rendered":"Male Cassin’s Finch Enjoying A Dandelion Smorgasbord"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several days ago I had a rare (for me) opportunity to photograph Cassin Finches in Montana’s Centennial Valley.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"cassein's1\/1250, f8, ISO 400, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A small flock of them, including this male,\u00a0was feeding on dandelion seeds next to the road along the south side of the valley. The table was conveniently set for them – all they had to do was perch on the fence wire and pick off the seeds in front of their faces. Very little effort required. Little is known about the diet of these birds because they’ve been studied so little but I can attest to the fact\u00a0that they do love dandelion seeds.<\/p>\n

The morning after this photo was taken\u00a0approximately 3500 cows were moved along a 75′ wide corridor between fences on either side of the road and this food source and the rest of the habitat were annihilated. It’s amazing how much damage that many cattle can do in such a short time.<\/p>\n

And it was no fun trying to drive that road and get through all those bawling cows and their frightened\u00a0calves.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Several days ago I had a rare (for me) opportunity to photograph Cassin Finches in Montana’s Centennial Valley.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31960,"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],"tags":[2530,2529,2095,555,1659,2531,107,136,211,220],"class_list":["post-31965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","tag-carpodacus-cassini","tag-cassins-finch","tag-cattle","tag-centennial-valley","tag-cows","tag-dandelion-seeds","tag-diet","tag-feeding","tag-male","tag-montana-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/casseins-finch-6948-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8jz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31965","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=31965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}