{"id":50909,"date":"2017-08-20T05:12:52","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T11:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=50909"},"modified":"2017-08-20T05:12:52","modified_gmt":"2017-08-20T11:12:52","slug":"a-confrontation-between-a-hummingbird-and-a-skipper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/20\/a-confrontation-between-a-hummingbird-and-a-skipper\/","title":{"rendered":"A Confrontation Between A Hummingbird And A Skipper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps\u00a0this hummingbird was getting tired of being pushed around by monarch butterflies\u00a0and took its frustrations out on this little guy.<\/p>\n

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First a brief description of skippers since some folks may be unfamiliar with them. Skippers are quite small\u00a0butterflies named for their quick, darting flight habits. There are\u00a03500 species of them\u00a0worldwide so most folks have likely\u00a0seen at least some of them. Many are orange or brown and I see them often in my area. This photo was taken the day before those that follow but at the same patch of Rocky Mountain Bee Plants where\u00a0I’ve been photographing hummingbirds and sphinx moths recently.<\/p>\n

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\u00a01\/6400, f\/6.3, 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

I had my lens trained on this Black-chinned Hummingbird feeding on the bee plant but I wasn’t taking any photos because it was too far away for quality shots. But when the hummer\u00a0came in close to the perched skipper as it was “browsing” on\u00a0the flowers I fired off a few bursts because you never know what might happen. Twice recently at this patch\u00a0I’ve seen larger\u00a0monarch butterflies intimidate and chase\u00a0hummingbirds off of their flowers\u00a0and I missed those shots so I didn’t want it to happen again.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, 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

For some time these two just ignored each other. In fact the hummer circled around this flower cluster as it fed on nectar\u00a0and at one point it was right on top of the skipper but neither reacted to the other while it happened.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, 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

But the skipper made the mistake of flying upwards off the flower and\u00a0appearing to challenge the hummer\u00a0and that definitely got the\u00a0hummingbird’s attention (the bird is soft here but you get the idea…).<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, 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

They were eyeball to eyeball for a\u00a0split-second and then the skipper apparently decided he’d bit off more than he could chew so he dived back down into the flower from where he had left.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, 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

But the hummer was on him in an instant and\u00a0made him pay a price by jabbing the little butterfly with its stiletto-like bill.<\/p>\n

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\"\"1\/6400, f\/6.3, 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

I’m pretty sure “Skip” made a clean getaway because two shots later in the burst he was gone and the hummer\u00a0seemed to be\u00a0gloating over its victory by hovering over the battlefield.<\/p>\n

Have I ever mentioned\u00a0that I love watching and photographing interesting\u00a0behaviors? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Perhaps this hummingbird was getting tired of being pushed around by monarch butterflies and took its frustrations out on this little guy.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50914,"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":[334,394,1678],"tags":[2186,2174,139,1679,3509,311],"class_list":["post-50909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-hummingbirds","tag-archilochus-alexandri","tag-black-chinned-hummingbird","tag-fight","tag-rocky-mountain-bee-plant","tag-skipper-butterfly","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/black-chinned-hummingbird-1666-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-df7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50909","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=50909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}