{"id":47698,"date":"2017-04-22T05:12:10","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T11:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=47698"},"modified":"2017-04-22T12:47:28","modified_gmt":"2017-04-22T18:47:28","slug":"red-tailed-hawk-with-a-slice-to-be-proud-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/22\/red-tailed-hawk-with-a-slice-to-be-proud-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Red-tailed Hawk With A “Slice” To Be Proud Of"},"content":{"rendered":"

For raptor enthusiasts a “slice” has nothing to do with golf.\u00a0Falconers and\u00a0others\u00a0refer to the ejection of fecal matter by birds of prey as a slice<\/strong>. Interestingly falcon excrement drops straight down but hawks and eagles fling their fecal matter out behind them some distance and\u00a0often with significant velocity.<\/p>\n

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This is the male of the nesting pair of Red-tailed Hawks I’ve posted other photos of recently. Yesterday morning I only spent a few minutes with him while he was away from the nest and his mate was on eggs. He was far away from me so these images have been cropped significantly and some of them are sharper than others.<\/p>\n

At one point he gave me a nice wing lift and I guess he figured that as long as he had his tail up and out of the way he might as well defecate.<\/p>\n

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I really don’t have an undue fascination with poop but with birds things happen so quickly that I often instinctively fire off a burst when their behavior changes to make sure I don’t miss anything interesting. That means I take a lot of “poop shots”. So when this guy let loose, especially since he was performing a wing stretch at the same time, I fired away.<\/p>\n

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But this\u00a0time the string of excrement\u00a0just kept comin’ and comin’…<\/p>\n

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until the flying\u00a0poop looked to be\u00a0approaching 3′ long.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen raptors slice many thousands of times over the years but I thought this was a particularly impressive performance.\u00a0The poor bird must have been “backed up” all the way to his gizzard!<\/p>\n

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Even the hawk seemed impressed as he looked back at his handiwork. After this shot I left the bird and drove down the road looking for other\u00a0subjects figuring nothing could\u00a0top that performance.<\/p>\n

I suppose these are just “novelty shots” but hey – it’s Saturday morning. What better time for it?<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

For raptor enthusiasts a “slice” has nothing to do with golf.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47702,"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":[5,334,1004,395,450],"tags":[452,1474,2422,847,451,3367,809],"class_list":["post-47698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-falconry-2","category-miscellaneous","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-defecate","tag-excrement","tag-falconry","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-slice","tag-wing-stretch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/red-tailed-hawk-4191-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-cpk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47698","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=47698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}