{"id":37997,"date":"2016-03-11T05:57:35","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T12:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=37997"},"modified":"2016-03-11T06:08:56","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T13:08:56","slug":"avocets-and-phalaropes-in-a-nasty-hailstorm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/11\/avocets-and-phalaropes-in-a-nasty-hailstorm\/","title":{"rendered":"Avocets And Phalaropes In A Nasty Hailstorm"},"content":{"rendered":"

In July of 2011 Mia and I visited perhaps our favorite place in the universe – Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife refuge in the Centennial Valley of Montana. This trip was memorable for a variety of reasons, including a hailstorm that literally\u00a0“rocked” our world and that of the birds around us.<\/p>\n

I used these images in a similar post about 5 years ago but since most current readers have never seen them I reworked the post for\u00a0this presentation.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"hailstorm-8163\"<\/p>\n

5:30<\/em> pm<\/em>. We were photographing American Avocets and Wilson’s Phalaropes on one of the refuge ponds when we looked behind us to the west and saw\u00a0an impressive storm building and beginning to head our way. It was really dumping on the foothills surrounding the valley and we figured things might get interesting so we decided to stay at the pond and see what happened.<\/p>\n

It was a good thing we were shooting from my pickup and not on foot\u00a0or we’d have been in trouble…<\/p>\n

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\"hailstorm-8168\"5:52 pm<\/em>. The slow-moving storm took a while to get to us but when it did it was impressive. It began to rain very hard which turned the pond into a frothing, foamy mess. It was\u00a0so intense that neither of us could keep water off of our lenses while they protruded from the windows\u00a0– in spite of the 7″ long hood on the end of my 500mm lens. We were shooting from my new Ford F-150\u00a0pickup but<\/em> the\u00a0engineers did a poor job on the roof rain channels and water simply poured inside off the roof whenever a window was down.<\/p>\n

As you can see in my side mirror, Mia (who shoots from the back seat) has taken a temporary respite from the downpour and has her lens pulled in and her\u00a0window up.<\/p>\n

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\"hailstorm-8195\"6:15 pm<\/em>.\u00a0 A temporary reprieve from the rain – with rainbow and light. But it was literally the calm before the (real) storm – a sucker hole. You can see my camping trailer (plus two outhouses) on the horizon.<\/p>\n

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\"wilsons-phalaropes-4970\"6:31 pm<\/em>. As the most intense part of the storm approached the birds reacted by bunching up in flocks of their own species\u00a0and flying\u00a0nervously around the pond.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5042\"6:32 pm<\/em>. As the hail began it became quite dark. Here you can see it impacting the water and if you look closely you can see that it is coming in at a slant from left to right causing the impact plumes on the water surface to splash to the right.\u00a0Later the direction of the hail would change.<\/p>\n

Occasionally I could see a hailstone striking a bird, even in flight.<\/p>\n

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\"american6:33 pm<\/em>. The behavior of the birds seemed to indicate that they didn’t know what to do to escape the hail. They flew circular patterns\u00a0in these tight flocks for a while but soon changed tactics.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5067\"6:33 pm<\/em>.\u00a0As the hail continued to intensify most of the avocets settled into the water while others simply raised their wings, floated up\u00a0in the wind and hovered over their companions. They were really being pummelled by the hail and\u00a0seemed very confused and frightened.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5105\"6:35 pm<\/em>. Within a couple of minutes they walked from the water to the shore and bunched up tightly against each other and against the background brush.\u00a0Apparently avocets\u00a0were just too large to huddle under most of the plants along the shore but that’s exactly what\u00a0most of\u00a0the smaller phalaropes did.\u00a0There are\u00a0phalaropes crouching out of sight\u00a0in the brush behind the avocets.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5110\"6:35 pm<\/em>.\u00a0Within seconds most of the hail abated and the intensity of the rain increased. The avocets reacted immediately by beginning to tentatively walk back toward the water.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5118\"6:35 <\/em>pm<\/em>.\u00a0The phalaropes reacted to the hail stoppage\u00a0almost as quickly as the avocets did.\u00a0Here you can see three of them emerging from the\u00a0 background brush and hovering\u00a0over the avocets.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5148\"6:37 pm<\/em>.\u00a0Even though it was still raining hard the avocets seemed almost jaunty in having survived the hail.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5213\"6:48 pm<\/em>. At times the rain would intensify again but the birds seemed to do fine with it, flying in small groups in tight little circles and then landing again – seemingly in celebration of having survived the hail.\u00a0 Notice in the upper background\u00a0that the direction of slant of the raindrops has now changed from some of my earlier images in this post.<\/p>\n

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\"american-avocets-5217\"6:57 pm<\/em>. These “celebratory” flights provided some nice opportunities for photos of the birds in flight against the threatening dark skies in the background. I liked this image of the avocets with a single phalarope amongst them in a formation that seemed almost protective of the phalarope.\u00a0The background “noise” in this image\u00a0is really rain.<\/p>\n

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\"wilsons-phalaropes-5233\"7:01 pm<\/em>. The phalaropes also\u00a0joined in these flights.\u00a0 Most of these birds are Wilson’s Phalaropes but a sharp-eyed observer will notice that\u00a0at least 6 of them are Red-necked Phalaropes (slightly smaller\u00a0with white markings on the\u00a0rear surface\u00a0of their\u00a0upper wings).<\/p>\n

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\"wilsons-phalaropes-5279\"<\/p>\n

7:06 pm<\/em>. And then to top it all off, as the storm dissipated\u00a0a glorious rainbow appeared to provide\u00a0background color for some more flight shots of the phalaropes.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0an experience this was for Mia and I and for the birds I’m sure.\u00a0 It impressed on me once\u00a0again just how vulnerable birds are to so many different\u00a0kinds of events – both natural and man-caused.\u00a0 If these hailstones had\u00a0been much larger I’m sure that\u00a0birds would have been injured or killed. Maybe some were and I just didn’t notice it.<\/p>\n

Even I felt a bit intimidated by the hail and I was inside my pickup.\u00a0 I can only imagine how frightening it must have been for the birds.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

General camera techs – The first 3 images in this post were taken with a Canon 40D and standard lens. The rest of them were taken with a Canon 7D and my older 500 f\/4 lens at ISO 800 and shutter speeds as low as 1\/500 second even for some of the birds in flight. Aperture was\u00a05.6.\u00a0Conditions were challenging to say the least.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

This trip to Montana’s Centennial Valley was memorable for a variety of reasons, including a hailstorm that literally “rocked” our world and that of the birds around us.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2387,"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":[381,334,395,1493,360,438],"tags":[27,555,434,2874,220,436,433,263,432],"class_list":["post-37997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-avocets","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-wilsons-phalarope-shore-birds","tag-american-avocet","tag-centennial-valley","tag-hail","tag-hailstorm","tag-montana-2","tag-rainbow","tag-red-necked-phalarope","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-wilsons-phalarope"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/american-avocets-5067.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-9SR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37997","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=37997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}