![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/red-tailed-hawk-9976C-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-9976C-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n1\/2500, 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>\nThis is the male of the nesting pair of Red-tailed Hawks I’ve been photographing recently. While his mate is on the nest he likes to perch on some rocks several hundred yards\u00a0to the south\u00a0as he presumably “stands guard”. Occasionally he flies back to the nest, sometimes with food and\u00a0sometimes not, to touch base with his lady. When he does he often hugs the contours of the hill in the background. With the hill so close to the bird it makes it difficult to keep sharp focus on the hawk in flight but I like having the hill in the image.<\/p>\n
This isn’t my best photo of a Red-tail in flight but there are several things I appreciate about it, including:<\/p>\n
\n- the hawk is in full flight at speed\u00a0rather than having just taken off<\/li>\n
- the hillside “grounds” the bird and gives the image some context which for my tastes\u00a0is much preferable to a homogenous blue sky as background<\/li>\n
- the hawk doesn’t bisect the horizon which happens so often\u00a0with this type of shot<\/li>\n
- I happened to catch the bird evenly spaced between the two out-of-focus dried stalks of vegetation sticking up into the sky instead of having one of them pass through the hawk’s body<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
By now I suspect these hawks are feeding rapidly growing chicks which means the adults will be making many trips to the nest carrying prey. Flight shots with prey are always one of my photographic goals so I look forward to visiting them again.<\/p>\n
Always at a respectful distance from the nest of course…<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the male of the nesting pair of Red-tailed Hawks I’ve been photographing recently.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48364,"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":[334,391,450],"tags":[2550,452,146,451,311],"class_list":["post-48360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-box-elder-county-utah","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-flight","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/red-tailed-hawk-9976C-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-cA0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48360","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=48360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}