![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/american-avocet-1843-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-avocet-1843-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n1\/3200, 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>\nWing lifts often (though not always) signal imminent takeoff so I was ready when it happened. This isn’t an ideal wing position but if they had been fully extended vertically\u00a0I’d have clipped or cut off the wings again and I do\u00a0prefer this over that.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I remove dark spots (floaters) on the water surface with the clone tool but in this situation there were so many of them I chose not to.<\/p>\n
\n- Note: This shot perplexes me a little. I typically use the reflection to level an image when the water’s relatively undisturbed – in this case I used the reflection of the eye and rotated until it was exactly vertical to the actual eye.<\/em> But the water ripples around the legs tell me that the image still needs some counterclockwise rotation. In other words those two visual cues apparently\u00a0don’t agree with each other. Occasionally that happens and I’m not sure why…<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It was a delight to get back to Bear River again. The refuge has been closed for several weeks due to flooding but they were able to reopen a\u00a0few days ago. With warm weather coming up snowmelt in the mountains is likely to cause them to shut down once again so locals had better get out there while they can.<\/p>\n
I’ve never seen so much water in the\u00a0wetlands approaching the refuge as I saw yesterday!<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By this time of year many American Avocets have already paired up and some of them are beginning early nesting activities.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47463,"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":[381,338,6,334,391],"tags":[27,49,916,137,3299,3358,211,230,471,591,276,605,2968],"class_list":["post-47461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-avocets","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-american-avocet","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-composition","tag-female","tag-flooding","tag-how-to-level-an-image","tag-male","tag-nesting","tag-recurvirostra-americana","tag-reflection","tag-sexual-dimorphism","tag-take-off","tag-wing-lift"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/american-avocet-1834-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-clv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47461","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=47461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/american-avocet-1814b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-avocet-1814b-ron-dudley\\"")
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