{"id":52463,"date":"2017-10-12T04:52:40","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T10:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=52463"},"modified":"2017-10-12T06:06:02","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T12:06:02","slug":"male-and-female-california-quail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/12\/male-and-female-california-quail\/","title":{"rendered":"Male And Female California Quail"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0rarely photograph California Quail because I’m generally not fond of the urban settings I usually find them in. Yesterday was different.<\/p>\n

Because of wind and poor light I didn’t go shooting in the morning as I’d hoped\u00a0so late in the day when the wind died down and we had some\u00a0nice light I headed down to the Jordan River to see if I’d get lucky. I had my lens on another bird when I heard a familiar sound and was surprised to see a small covey of California Quail coming my way.<\/p>\n

This was one of those many, many\u00a0times when I was glad I was shooting from my pickup. The quail virtually ignored my vehicle and acted like I wasn’t even there.\u00a0At first they approached me so closely I couldn’t even fit an individual bird in frame. I\u00a0refer to\u00a0my pickup as\u00a0my “mobile blind” for good reason.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is one of about a half-dozen females and juveniles in the covey. She never did give me a great pose but I thought I’d include a photo of her for comparison to the male.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

And this is the male who spent no time at all feeding in the grasses as all the other birds did. His role was that of sentry – to watch out for any potential\u00a0threats to the rest of the covey. He was completely attentive to his mission the entire time I was with these birds. Not one time did I see him peck for seeds or insects as all the other quail were doing.<\/p>\n

The background\u00a0in all three of these photos is water.<\/p>\n

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

1\/640, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s a steep bank down to the shaded\u00a0water in the background\u00a0so\u00a0in this image\u00a0all the other\u00a0quail are out of view below the top of the bank. But\u00a0from this viewpoint\u00a0the male\u00a0could\u00a0see both them and me without even moving his head so he didn’t budge from this spot the entire time the rest of the covey was feeding\u00a0down there. I’m sure he wanted to make sure I didn’t make any suspicious moves.<\/p>\n

I like to think he’s so relaxed at his sentry post that he had his legs crossed as he leaned against the tree.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure he didn’t doze off though. After all, sleeping on sentry duty is a capital offense.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I seldom photograph California Quail because I’m generally not fond of the urban settings I usually find them in. Yesterday was different.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52465,"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":[6,334,2515],"tags":[2512,2513,137,211,3089,1101,311,3133],"class_list":["post-52463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-california-quail","tag-california-quail","tag-callipepla-californica","tag-female","tag-male","tag-salt-lake-county","tag-sentry","tag-utah-2","tag-vehicle-as-a-mobile-blind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/california-quail-2033-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dEb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52463","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=52463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}