![\"american-kestrel-4844\"](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/american-kestrel-48441.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-4844\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0December 13, 2010\u00a0<\/p>\n
1\/1000, f\/7.1, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc<\/em><\/p>\nThis bird preened for me for a good long time and finished it off with a\u00a0vigorous shake of his feathers.\u00a0 I didn’t have enough shutter speed to freeze the action but I liked the effect of movement, especially on the\u00a0motion-bent tail feathers.\u00a0 It was almost noon when this shot was taken – late enough in the\u00a0day that the low winter sun provided some sidelight rather than the impossible backlight.\u00a0 However it did make for a\u00a0very bright area on the sun-side of the perch.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have hundreds of images of kestrels on this snag – every one of them taken in the dead of winter.\u00a0 You just can’t get close to them when it warms up.\u00a0 But now the perch is gone.\u00a0 There’s a bright side to all of this – I’ll no longer have to deal with the problem of the awful light angle this perch presented.\u00a0 \u00a0Only a bird photographer can imagine the frustration of being within 20 feet of a kestrel on a natural perch at eye level with the bird just looking at you like it’s waiting for you to snap the shutter but you know that if you do you’ll just have lots of images to delete when you get home because of the bad light.\u00a0 I must admit that I often fired away anyway – simply could not\u00a0 resist.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\nI will miss this snag.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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This was a perch I had a love-hate relationship with for almost four years.\u00a0 It was a\u00a0small, very old\u00a0and sun-bleached\u00a0snag\u00a0along the road down unit 1 at Farmington Bay Wildlife Management Area.\u00a0 I loved it because American Kestrels liked to use it as a hunting perch, it was close to the road, not too high and it was natural and photogenic.\u00a0 I hated it because it was on the east side of the road (I could only shoot from the road in my vehicle – open the door and the kestrel skedaddles) which meant that I was\u00a0usually shooting into the sun in the morning which is my favorite time to photograph birds.\u00a0 Back-lit kestrels are generally not\u00a0a pretty sight… That road down unit 1 is closed for the nesting season (March\u00a0through September) and I was very disappointed to see on my first trip down the road this fall that the\u00a0snag was gone.\u00a0 It may have fallen down on its own, been removed by refuge managers (which I doubt) or perhaps it was vandalized – I just don’t know.\u00a0 But I will miss it, as will the kestrels I’m sure.\u00a0 Avian photographers on this continent are well aware of how difficult\u00a0this species is to get close to – they’re very skittish and almost never allow a close approach for photography.\u00a0 That changes in mid-winter when it’s very cold.\u00a0 They simply are\u00a0much more reluctant to fly when it’s that frigid and the photographer can\u00a0occasionally get quite close to them, especially when shooting from a vehicle.\u00a0\u00a0 But most\u00a0nature photographers…<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[340,6,334,337],"tags":[28,550,131,132,397,134,191,549,552,551],"class_list":["post-3301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-diurnal-raptors","tag-american-kestrel","tag-diffuse-light","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-falcon","tag-farmington-bay","tag-farmington-bay-wildlife-management-area","tag-kestrel","tag-perch","tag-preen","tag-side-light"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Rf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3301","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=3301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"american-kestrel-3716\"](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/american-kestrel-37161.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-3716\\"")
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