{"id":45717,"date":"2017-02-06T06:16:57","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T13:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=45717"},"modified":"2017-02-06T08:17:01","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T15:17:01","slug":"red-tailed-hawk-in-flight-with-prey-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/06\/red-tailed-hawk-in-flight-with-prey-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Red-tailed Hawk In Flight With Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning I made the 90 minute drive to a remote area of Box Elder County only to have low,\u00a0bright-white clouds roll in soon after I arrived. There was a tremendous amount of snow on the ground up there\u00a0so I was in a completely white world. Much of the time I couldn’t even see a horizon\u00a0because the ground blended into the sky at a boundary that could not be discerned – definitely not the best conditions for bird photography.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0this cooperative adult Red-tailed Hawk with prey was a huge\u00a0challenge under those conditions.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Here the hawk is perched on the side of a south-facing cliff so there’s little snow there. Notice that the bird has the remains of a rabbit in its talons. The hawk’s crop appeared to be bulging so it wasn’t interested in eating at the moment but it still didn’t want to give up the rabbit, especially to the likes of a…<\/p>\n

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pesky nearby magpie that we see in the same image cropped differently.<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

So eventually the hawk took off with the rabbit and I was able to get several reasonably sharp photos just before it flew in front of the cliff face to my left. Here the (un)lucky rabbit’s foot dangling down helps to identify the prey.<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Notice how the bird has pulled the rabbit straight up into its body rather than tucking its prey-laden feet under the base of its tail like they usually do\u00a0during flight when they’re not carrying anything heavy. This must be the most energy-efficient position to carry the large rabbit.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the last sharp shot I got before the hawk passed in front of the cliff face and my focus points grabbed onto the nearby rocks.<\/p>\n

There’s another parallel story here that I should cover for photographers who wonder about my incredibly high shutter speed when the bird took off. I shoot in aperture priority and with that bright-white background my SS was what I call “hummingbird fast”. But I knew that since it was carrying heavy and unwieldly\u00a0prey there was a very good chance that the hawk would launch at a low angle and pass in front of the much darker\u00a0cliff face instead of taking off upwards into the bright sky and if that happened my SS would drop dramatically. I wanted to make sure I at least had a chance for sharp flight shots as it passed in front of the dark cliff face so I left my SS incredibly high when the bird first\u00a0took off.<\/p>\n

Did it work? Well,… yes and no.<\/p>\n

You’ll notice that in the last shot above my SS has already dropped by half (1\/8000 to 1\/4000) as the background begins to become darker. As the bird passed directly in front of the much darker cliff face my SS dropped all the way down to 1\/1250 – barely fast enough for a hawk in flight. But in those shots all I have is sharp rocks and a very soft bird because my focus points grabbed onto the nearby cliff.<\/p>\n

Next time I hope to have the skill required to keep locked onto the bird in those conditions.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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This cooperative adult Red-tailed Hawk with prey was a huge challenge under difficult conditions yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45722,"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":[6,334,392,450],"tags":[34,1940,689,452,146,256,459,451,286],"class_list":["post-45717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-aperture-priority","tag-bird-photography-technique","tag-box-elder-county","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-flight","tag-prey","tag-rabbit","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-snow"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/red-tailed-hawk-0315-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-bTn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45717","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=45717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}