{"id":47914,"date":"2017-05-02T04:54:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T10:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=47914"},"modified":"2017-05-02T05:17:25","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T11:17:25","slug":"yesterdays-swainsons-hawks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/yesterdays-swainsons-hawks\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s Swainson’s Hawks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was a banner day for Swainson’s Hawks in northern Utah. They seemed to be everywhere on fence posts, power poles, trees and in the sky.<\/p>\n

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This beautiful dark morph was the first one I encountered. It had been cloudy until shortly before I pulled up on the bird just after dawn but just before I snapped this shot a hole in the clouds opened up and lit up the bird with golden light with the background still in deep shade. I love the effect\u00a0of the soft, warm\u00a0light on the chocolate-colored bird on a gnarly old\u00a0wooden post\u00a0against the very\u00a0dark background.<\/p>\n

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This light morph wasn’t having a good morning. There was some kind of debris stuck on its face at the base of its bill and the bird was quite irritated by it. It’s a little difficult to see here but…<\/p>\n

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when the hawk tried to scratch it off it became more visible. I suspect it might have been a small clump of sticky white feathers from prey – Swainson’s Hawks do occasionally take small birds to supplement their more common small mammal and insect prey. There also appears to be some of those feathers stuck on one of its talons. The hawk scratched at its face repeatedly while I was with it.<\/p>\n

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Some of the hawks were exceedingly tame and reluctant to fly. At times large noisy\u00a0trucks would go whizzing by within about 20′ of a bird on a fencepost and it wouldn’t even flinch. This one stayed put until it chose to…<\/p>\n

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leave for its own reasons…<\/p>\n

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and I caught it in a posture I like as it did so.<\/p>\n

In ten years of photographing birds I’ve never seen such a dense concentration of Swainson’s Hawks (or any other buteo species). In some areas there was one or two hawks perched on every power pole with another one perched on a wire just a few feet away.<\/p>\n

It was a Swainson’s kind of morning!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Please let me know if you see anything strange in the formatting (or anything else) of today’s post.\u00a0For some unknown reason my WordPress editing screen has gone all wonky and I’m having a difficult time composing the post and\u00a0predicting how it will look when it’s published. For that reason I ran out of time so I haven’t included image techs.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Yesterday was a banner day for Swainson’s Hawks in northern Utah. They seemed to be everywhere on fence posts, power poles, trees and in the sky.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47918,"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":[334,645],"tags":[647,969,646,2738,311],"class_list":["post-47914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-dark-morph","tag-swainsons-hawk","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/swainsons-hawk-6385-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-csO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47914","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=47914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}