{"id":39523,"date":"2016-05-16T05:52:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T11:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=39523"},"modified":"2016-05-16T07:57:12","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T13:57:12","slug":"mating-swainsons-hawks-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/16\/mating-swainsons-hawks-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Mating Swainson’s Hawks Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week in northern Utah a pair of Swainson’s Hawks mated right in front of me. I’ve seen it happen fairly often over the years but this time they were\u00a0reasonably\u00a0close, I had good light, an unobstructed view and my camera was ready. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.<\/p>\n

All images are presented in the order they were taken.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

But I sure didn’t know it was coming. I was photographing the young female while her mate was perched on a power pole some distance away when suddenly…<\/p>\n

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

the male appeared in my viewfinder and he was\u00a0coming in fast. At this point the female had already assumed a submissive posture with her head down.<\/p>\n

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

The male curled around to my left so he could land on her back.<\/p>\n

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

Touchdown, but it wasn’t a perfect landing. Instead of landing on the center of her back he landed to the left of center.<\/p>\n

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

I believe the off-center landing was the beginning of the problems they had mating. The female has raised her left wing and the tail of the male has bisected it between her primaries and secondaries which made it very difficult if not impossible for the male to reach her cloacal opening with his own.<\/p>\n

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

This is the single image of the behavior that I posted last week and many of us speculated about the origin of the feathers below the male’s right wing. Did they belong to the tail of the male or not? After studying this series of images (including others not posted here) I’m fairly confident that those feathers are the female’s left wing\u00a0secondaries twisted to an unusual angle by the mutual activities of the hawks.<\/p>\n

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

Both birds struggled for some time to consummate the act and at this point the male appears to be considering giving up in frustration\u00a0and making his getaway but…<\/p>\n

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

he apparently changed his mind and tried for a while longer.<\/p>\n

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

But eventually his left foot slipped off her back and landed on the crook of her wing. That twisted his body at a 90 degree angle to hers and made their goal even more difficult to achieve so…<\/p>\n

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

he gave up and flew off…<\/p>\n

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

leaving the female behind to rearrange her wings and watch him as he departed.<\/p>\n

But that isn’t the end of the story. I stayed with the female a while longer but what I didn’t know was that the male had other appetites\u00a0he wanted to satisfy. When I eventually left the female and drove a short distance down the road something else unexpected was waiting for me.<\/p>\n

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

I found the male on top of a fence post (in bad side\u00a0light) eating an obviously road-killed rabbit. Apparently he had flown with it from the road to the post and he was eating it enthusiastically. This surprised me. Though Swainson’s Hawks are known to eat rabbits I’ve only seen them eating voles and grasshoppers. I believe our local jackrabbits would be too large for these hawks to subdue or\u00a0fly with (especially the smaller male)\u00a0when they’re in pristine condition but this smashed rabbit had likely been fed on by the Turkey Vultures that are common in the area so it had lost much of its original mass.<\/p>\n

The hawk fed on the rabbit for a long time but\u00a0eventually\u00a0his eating slowed and then stopped. When he took off some time later he carried the rabbit with him and landed with it…<\/p>\n

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

in a pasture across the road. Perhaps his intention was simply to stash the rabbit in a less conspicuous place because he didn’t eat any more of it…<\/p>\n

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

and soon left it behind. As you can see he definitely has a bulging crop.<\/p>\n

I don’t believe that these hawks were successful in mating on this day but the next\u00a0morning I saw them mating again atop a power pole. And it appears that the female is now incubating eggs in a nest\u00a0near the top of a tree some distance\u00a0away (I don’t closely\u00a0approach nests).<\/p>\n

I wish them luck in raising their family.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Sorry about the lack of image techs this morning, I just didn’t have the time. But I will tell you about another bit of good fortune I had during the mating session. Just before the male unexpectedly flew in I had changed my aperture from f\/6.3 to f\/11 in an attempt to give me more depth of field to get more of the setting sharp. Later, during the attempted\u00a0mating, I\u00a0changed it to f\/9. I believe these aperture settings allowed me to get better sharpness in both birds than I’d have been able to achieve at f\/6.3. Another stroke of luck…<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s the tech range for most of the mating images: 1\/640 – 1\/1000, f\/9 – f\/11, ISO 400,\u00a0Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in, all images taken from my pickup<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Last week in northern Utah a pair of Swainson’s Hawks mated right in front of me. I’ve seen it happen fairly often over the years but this time they were close, I had good light, an unobstructed view and my camera was ready. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39526,"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":[334,392,391,645],"tags":[689,647,2852,1174,1016,459,646,311],"class_list":["post-39523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-nesting-and-mating","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-box-elder-county","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-copulating","tag-eating","tag-mating","tag-rabbit","tag-swainsons-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/swainsons-hawk-7813-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-aht","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39523","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=39523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}