{"id":45478,"date":"2017-01-28T06:19:08","date_gmt":"2017-01-28T13:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=45478"},"modified":"2017-01-28T08:30:14","modified_gmt":"2017-01-28T15:30:14","slug":"fighting-common-goldeneyes-the-rest-of-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/28\/fighting-common-goldeneyes-the-rest-of-the-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Common Goldeneyes – The Rest Of The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over a week ago I\u00a0blogged about a pair of fighting\u00a0Common Goldeneyes<\/a>. The male, while minding his own business, was attacked by the female and he retaliated viciously – eventually driving her off. But that wasn’t the end of the story. That post required 18 images and I didn’t feel like I could include any more in a single post.<\/p>\n

So this\u00a0morning’s post tells “the rest of the story”.<\/p>\n

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In order to set the stage I’ll begin with this image from the previous post to demonstrate the original fight between the two goldeneyes. After a prolonged and intense battle the male came out victorious and after the female left the immediate area in apparent defeat…<\/p>\n

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the male\u00a0performed a glorious wing-flap…<\/p>\n

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in an apparent\u00a0proclamation of his victory and his dominance. He looks so proud of himself. Touchdown!<\/p>\n

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But\u00a0even before he settled completely\u00a0back down into the water I noticed the female, perhaps 30′ away, performing a wing flap of her own. I believe he may be actually watching her do it in this photo.<\/p>\n

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This seemed to enrage the male and he aggressively rushed at her once again (this image is horribly soft but I needed to include it to effectively tell the story). The female skittered away across the water a few feet…<\/p>\n

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but the male pursued her in an obvious attempt to…<\/p>\n

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“cut her off at the pass”.<\/p>\n

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So\u00a0the chase began again\u00a0(another soft shot…).<\/p>\n

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The male got within a few inches of her…<\/p>\n

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and then let her go – this shot was taken just as he started to slow in the water which pushed up a large\u00a0“bow wave”\u00a0in front of him. Immediately after this photo was taken the female flew off downriver and stayed away the rest of the time I was there.<\/p>\n

Prior to this fight these two birds were swimming together and foraging for food in very close proximity to each other (sometimes almost touching)\u00a0so I thought they were a bonded pair. If they were it just goes to show that even love-birds can have their occasional spats.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – I’m having internet problems this morning so I wasn’t able to include any image techs…<\/em><\/p>\n

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This is a continuation of a previous post.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45486,"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":[334,376,394],"tags":[2847,91,137,140,188,211,311],"class_list":["post-45478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-common-goldeneyes","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-bucephala-clangula","tag-common-goldeneye","tag-female","tag-fighting","tag-jordan-river","tag-male","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/common-goldeneye-6578-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-bPw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45478","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=45478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}