{"id":44816,"date":"2017-01-04T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T13:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=44816"},"modified":"2017-01-04T06:23:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T13:23:58","slug":"common-goldeneye-a-wing-flap-with-an-unusual-twist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/04\/common-goldeneye-a-wing-flap-with-an-unusual-twist\/","title":{"rendered":"Common Goldeneye – A Wing Flap With An Unusual Twist"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a little thing but it was a behavior I hadn’t seen before.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4350-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

Yesterday afternoon I spent some time at my neighborhood pond photographing Common Goldeneyes. Much of the pond is iced over so large numbers of birds (mostly hybrid ducks, coots, gulls and geese)\u00a0are largely\u00a0confined to relatively small areas of open water. There were bursts of excitement on the pond because every time one of the goldeneyes would surface with food hordes of gulls would rush in and try to steal it. Perhaps that explains the alert pose of this adult male.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4116-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

He was at the edge of the ice (seen in the upper background) when he started to raise up…<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4119-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

and perform a wing flap. At this point I’d lost some of the light so the pretty glossy-green of the male’s head wasn’t very apparent during the entire performance.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4120-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

But he put on quite a wing-flapping show.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4121-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

I was able to catch his wings in a variety of positions.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4122-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

Typically when I photograph a wing-flapping duck many of the poses are almost identical but…<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4124-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

this bird gradually rotated in the water during his performance so each pose was slightly different and I appreciated that.<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4127-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eventually he began to settle back down into the water…<\/p>\n

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\"common-goldeneye-4128-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

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

and then the performance was over. But as you may have noticed there was something just a little unusual about this one.<\/p>\n

He kept his beak wide open the entire time. I took 14 shots of him from the time he began to rise in the water to when he settled back down and his beak was wide open in every one of them. I’m almost positive he wasn’t vocalizing so keeping his beak open must have had some other behavioral significance. I photographed this bird and another immature male doing wing-flaps several different\u00a0times\u00a0and this was the only time either had their beaks open while they did it.<\/p>\n

I’m not trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill but when I see something new like this it always makes me curious. Subtle behaviors often have significant meanings for birds and I enjoy at least trying to interpret them so I attempted to research this\u00a0one but it turned up nothing.<\/p>\n

But I still find it interesting whether I understand it or not.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

It was a little thing but it was a behavior I hadn’t seen before.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44822,"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":true,"_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":[5,334,376,395],"tags":[3246,50,2847,91,211,3089,311,739],"class_list":["post-44816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-common-goldeneyes","category-miscellaneous","tag-beak-open","tag-behavior","tag-bucephala-clangula","tag-common-goldeneye","tag-male","tag-salt-lake-county","tag-utah-2","tag-wing-flap"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/common-goldeneye-4124-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-bEQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44816","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=44816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}