{"id":48961,"date":"2017-06-12T05:41:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-12T11:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=48961"},"modified":"2017-06-12T06:32:21","modified_gmt":"2017-06-12T12:32:21","slug":"kingbird-riding-the-back-of-a-red-tailed-hawk-in-flight-with-prey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/12\/kingbird-riding-the-back-of-a-red-tailed-hawk-in-flight-with-prey\/","title":{"rendered":"Kingbird Riding The Back Of A Red-tailed Hawk In Flight With Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are poor quality shots but they include two interesting behaviors from two different species so I thought they were worth a look-see.<\/p>\n

There are multiple reasons for the poor quality – initially the birds were far away, they were side-lit, some aren’t very sharp, the damned power lines got in the way and operator error may have played a part. I won’t be including image techs because these were grab shots\u00a0and they weren’t particularly appropriate for the situation anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Two weeks ago I stopped along a road for a\u00a0minute or so\u00a0to see how the Red-tailed Hawks chicks were doing in a nest on a power pole I’ve been watching all spring. Soon the male of the pair (I believe it’s the male) took off from another power pole down the line and headed toward the nest with a vole for the chicks. At first I was just watching him through my lens without taking any shots because he was so far away and the light angle was poor. But when a pugnacious little Western Kingbird started beating up on the hawk I instinctively fired away.<\/p>\n

I saw the kingbird strike the hawk three times and the\u00a0raptor recoiled each time (here he has his nictitating membrane closed to protect his eye from injury). For one series of images the kingbird was actually riding on the back of the hawk.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In this shot the hawk is transferring the vole from his beak to his right foot although most of that process is hidden from view by the damned power line.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here the transfer has been completed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The kingbird was persistent in its attack…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

which made the hawks flight erratic as he tried to fly with the awkward vole, react to and threaten the kingbird and avoid the multiple wires that were in his path. Eventually the kingbird\u00a0veered off…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and left the hawk which allowed him to make\u00a0his approach to the nest without interference from the diminutive but feisty songbird. Here the hawk\u00a0has his eye on the nest on the pole directly in front of and just above\u00a0him.<\/p>\n

Kingbirds are fearless little fighters when defending their nesting territory and this one demonstrated clearly why they’re called kingbirds and their genus name is Tyrannus<\/em> (tyrant). And I have to wonder why the hawk\u00a0transferred the vole from beak to talons – was it typical of this bird to do it just before he landed on the nest with food? Or was it so he’d have his beak free to threaten and scream at the kingbird in flight? I just don’t know…<\/p>\n

Because of their poor quality I very nearly deleted these images and early on I certainly never considered posting them. But over the last two weeks I kept coming back to them because I was so interested in the behaviors of both birds so I finally relented because I thought that\u00a0if I found them interesting others might too.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

These are poor quality shots but they include two interesting behaviors from two different species so I thought they were worth a look-see.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48970,"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":[334,394,391,450,675],"tags":[1405,146,440,228,256,677,315,676],"class_list":["post-48961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-tailed-hawks","category-western-kingbirds","tag-attack","tag-flight","tag-mobbing","tag-nest","tag-prey","tag-tyrannus-verticalus","tag-vole","tag-western-kingbird"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/red-tailed-hawk-3198b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-cJH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48961","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=48961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}