{"id":34840,"date":"2015-10-24T05:10:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T11:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=34840"},"modified":"2015-10-24T05:24:07","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T11:24:07","slug":"grebe-with-a-big-fish-and-two-first-of-season-bird-species-yay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/24\/grebe-with-a-big-fish-and-two-first-of-season-bird-species-yay\/","title":{"rendered":"Grebe With A Big Fish And Two First-of-season Bird Species – Yay!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grebes sometimes “bite off” more than they can chew.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pied-billed<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

Occasionally I see a Pied-billed Grebe with a fish that’s apparently too big to swallow and I believe that to be the case with this bird, photographed at Farmington two days ago. When such a large fish has been freshly caught they’ll spend a long time on the surface trying to swallow it but I believe that this grebe had already tried and mostly given up on getting it down the hatch. But\u00a0after all that work it just didn’t have the heart to release it which kind of reminded me some “catch and release” fishermen in the same situation…<\/p>\n

I strongly suspect that the grebe was never able to swallow the fish but I don’t know\u00a0for sure because…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pied-billed<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4l IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

just\u00a0a few seconds later a gull with thievery in mind swooped down on the grebe so it dived with the fish to escape. I didn’t see it re-emerge with the fish. Gulls are\u00a0habitual kleptoparasites of grebes and they regularly attempt to steal their fish. Just 13 minutes later I saw (and photographed poorly) a Ring-billed Gull almost land on top of a Clark’s Grebe as it attempted to steal the grebe’s fish but the grebe dived with it at the last split-second and avoided losing its prize.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The rest of this post may seem a little disjointed with the first part but I thought some photographers and birders might be interested in two sightings I had\u00a0yesterday at Bear River MBR – both were my first-of-season sightings of returning migratory species that spend the winter in my area (northern Utah). The photos below are of documentary quality only.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough-legged<\/p>\n

The first was\u00a0this beautiful dark morph Rough-legged Hawk that I was only able to photograph from a great distance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"tundra<\/p>\n

And the second was a small flock of Tundra Swans, though this frame shows only two of them.<\/p>\n

I’m always delighted to see both of these species return and these sightings were especially exciting because they occurred within four minutes of each other and I was pretty much skunked for the rest of the morning at Bear River. For me that’s a long way to drive to come home empty…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Grebes sometimes “bite off” more than they can chew.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34841,"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":[338,334,392,359,1912],"tags":[49,2718,88,969,1008,141,1430,251,993,2719,269,1913,311],"class_list":["post-34840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-pied-billed-grebes","category-tundra-swans","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-catch-and-release","tag-clarks-grebe","tag-dark-morph","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fish","tag-kleptoparasitism","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-podilymbus-podiceps","tag-ring-billed-gull","tag-rough-legged-hawk","tag-tundra-swan","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/pied-billed-grebe-0438-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-93W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34840","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=34840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}