{"id":47384,"date":"2017-04-09T06:09:55","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T12:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=47384"},"modified":"2017-04-09T06:09:55","modified_gmt":"2017-04-09T12:09:55","slug":"two-views-of-the-beautiful-backside-of-a-male-american-kestrel-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/09\/two-views-of-the-beautiful-backside-of-a-male-american-kestrel-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Views Of The Beautiful Backside Of A Male American Kestrel In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s rare for me to post photos of birds where neither their eye or their face can be seen. But sometimes it’s the plumage that steals the show and for me male kestrels rule the raptor\u00a0roost when it comes to spectacular colors and patterns.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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

Last November I spent some time with this beautiful male as he hunted grasshoppers from an elevated perch near Farmington’s Goose Egg Island (these days it’s really a hill not an island). He repeatedly swooped down to the side of the hill after prey and then returned to the same perch whether successful or not. These two shots are successive images as he made an attempt.<\/p>\n

I love this look at his entire dorsal surface in good light. This view includes so many of the classic field marks of the male including the blue-gray wings contrasting with the rufous body and tail, the black sub terminal band on the tail and the striking white markings on the wings. And the alulae (bastard wings) are fully extended and obvious as he uses them for additional control and braking power just before impact.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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 curved shape of his right wing reveals his right\u00a0foot ready to pounce on the assumed grasshopper. This time he came up empty but he returned to the perch and succeeded in\u00a0capturing\u00a0grasshoppers in succeeding attempts.<\/p>\n

For me there’s a small mystery in the first image – there’s a narrow band of white in front of\u00a0each wing where they meet the body that I can’t explain. The ventral surface of their wings\u00a0is largely\u00a0creamy white but it doesn’t\u00a0look to me like we’re seeing the edge of it and that white doesn’t exist on the left wing\u00a0in the second shot. At first I thought we might be seeing the edges of a white rock in front of the bird but the second image reveals that no such rock is there. The white isn’t a processing artifact because it exists in the RAW file.<\/p>\n

I’m sure there’s a simple and probably obvious explanation but at 5 am\u00a0it escapes me. I probably just\u00a0need more coffee…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rare for me to post photos of birds where neither their eye or their face can be seen. But sometimes it’s the plumage that steals the show and for me male kestrels rule the raptor roost when it comes to spectacular colors and patterns.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":[340,334,2782],"tags":[953,1348,28,3356,1620,131,1008,679,146,178,211],"class_list":["post-47384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-alula","tag-alulae","tag-american-kestrel","tag-colors-and-patterns","tag-dorsal-view","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-field-marks","tag-flight","tag-hunting","tag-male"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ckg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47384","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=47384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}