![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/northern-flicker-6052-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"northern-flicker-6052-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nI rarely get photos that actually show these red shafts because they usually can’t be seen when the bird is perched and I seldom get photos of\u00a0flickers in flight.<\/p>\n
And yes, I recognize the irony of posting a photo I like of the same species I complained about in yesterday’s post because they never cooperate with me. But as chance would have it I did get lucky with a flicker in flight yesterday morning at Farmington Bay WMA\u00a0so I decided to publish back to back posts about the same species.<\/p>\n
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1\/8000, f\/6.3, 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 This female tried to be as nasty with me as flickers usually are but this time I was a split-second quicker than she was. As I pulled up on her and stopped my pickup I already had my lens out the window but even so she took off before I could get any perched shots or adjust my camera settings, thus the exorbitant shutter speed.\u00a0I did manage to get this one taken\u00a0immediately after liftoff though. This wing position shows off\u00a0the\u00a0beautiful\u00a0red shafts of the wing primaries and gives us a glimpse of the spectacular salmon-red coloring found\u00a0on the underside of\u00a0the wings.<\/p>\n There’s an interesting history behind the name of the Northern Flicker. For years the Red -shafted Flicker of the American West\u00a0and the Yellow-shafted Flicker back east were considered to be separate species. But there was a problem with that classification – on the western Great Plains where their ranges meet the two “species” not only commonly\u00a0interbred with each other\u00a0but their offspring\u00a0were fertile, <\/em>producing intergrades between them that are still common in that area. That doesn’t fit well with the definition of “species” so today these two color variations are considered to be subspecies of a single species, the\u00a0Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus)<\/em>.<\/p>\n Yes, I was happy to get this shot yesterday but I still don’t consider that I’ve won my war with the flickers because this bird is slightly past me, I had to add canvas on the right for composition and the head of the\u00a0bird in a larger version of the image is a hair short of tack sharp.<\/p>\n I’ll consider this image to\u00a0represent a battle fought to stalemate rather than a war that’s been\u00a0won.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Addendum:<\/em><\/p>\n Blog reader Paul Hess in a private email\u00a0has brought up the tentative\u00a0possibility that this bird might be an ”\u00a0\u201corange-shafted\u201d intergrade between red and yellow” and I\u00a0wonder if that might be the case.<\/em><\/p>\n If it were I’d be slightly surprised because it’s my understanding that flickers are only slightly migratory and Yellow-shafted Flickers aren’t normally found in my neck of the woods (we have\u00a0red-shafted all year around here). And the illustration of a Red-shafted in flight in my Sibley’s field guide shows the color to be similar to this bird. <\/em><\/p>\n But I also believe I’ve seen flickers whose colors are a little\u00a0more red than this. Any thoughts from my readers?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I rarely get photos that actually show these red shafts because they usually can’t be seen when the bird is perched and I seldom get photos of flickers in flight.<\/p>\n