{"id":50833,"date":"2017-08-18T04:52:12","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T10:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=50833"},"modified":"2017-08-18T12:07:50","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T18:07:50","slug":"hummingbirds-and-bee-plant-finally-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/18\/hummingbirds-and-bee-plant-finally-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Hummingbirds And Bee Plant – Finally Again!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers know that I prefer to photograph birds in natural settings and that includes hummingbirds. For a variety of reasons hummingbirds are often easily\u00a0photographed\u00a0at setups or back yard feeders but that just\u00a0isn’t my style. Largely for that reason I don’t post hummingbird photos\u00a0very often because finding them in a natural setting where they can be photographed well isn’t easy.<\/p>\n

Three\u00a0years ago I had a blast for several days shooting hummers as they fed on the nectar of Rocky Mountain Bee Plant – also known as stinkweed, stinking clover and Navajo spinach . This member of the Cleome<\/em> genus has an unpleasant smell but it’s flower clusters attract a variety of pollinators including hummingbirds.\u00a0Since the plant seemed so productive for hummers I looked for\u00a0it often over the last two years but patches of it\u00a0were unusually scarce and when I did find one there were never any hummingbirds on it.<\/p>\n

But yesterday morning\u00a0I finally found both – hummers and bee plant. Because of the topography I couldn’t get quite as close as I’d have liked but I still got a few shots I enjoyed. These are two of them.<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/5.6, ISO 640, 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>\n

There were several species feeding on the nectar and I believe this one is a Black-chinned Hummingbird, possibly a young male, but my hummer ID skills are sadly\u00a0lacking and I can’t be sure. There’s not a lot of color showing in the bird but I liked the pose and the mostly\u00a0clean background.<\/p>\n

One of the things I really appreciate about my lens is that it’s fast enough (f\/4) to get shutter speeds that are plenty fast enough to freeze even hummingbird wings in natural light (without flash). I refuse to use flash on birds – that’s just a thing of mine, partly because it seems like such an incredibly rude thing to do. Here I even had significantly\u00a0more SS than I needed and that was with the teleconverter attached<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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>\n

The most common species on the flower patch was Rufous Hummingbirds – a favorite of mine.<\/p>\n

The Rufous Hummingbird is known as North America’s \u201cextremist\u201d hummingbird because of its unusually aggressive nature, even for a hummer. I saw these birds chase off several other\u00a0hummingbirds of at least two species and they often do the same thing to large pollinating insects like sphinx moths.<\/p>\n

But I did see one thing that\u00a0took me aback yesterday\u00a0– an insect that chased off a rufous.<\/p>\n

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It was one of the many monarch butterflies feeding at the patch. The butterfly came in deliberately and aggressively toward the hummer and chased it off of a flower, I’m quite sure of it.<\/p>\n

And that definitely surprised me.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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I prefer to photograph birds in natural settings and that includes hummingbirds.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50835,"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":[6,334,392,394,1678],"tags":[2174,498,3505,3504,1629,1679,2173,2175,282,311],"class_list":["post-50833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-hummingbirds","tag-black-chinned-hummingbird","tag-cleome","tag-freezing-wings","tag-lens-speed","tag-monarch-butterfly","tag-rocky-mountain-bee-plant","tag-rufous-hummingbird","tag-setups","tag-shutter-speed","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/rufous-hummingbird-0741-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ddT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50833","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=50833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}