{"id":54158,"date":"2017-12-02T06:36:04","date_gmt":"2017-12-02T13:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=54158"},"modified":"2017-12-02T06:36:04","modified_gmt":"2017-12-02T13:36:04","slug":"adult-bald-eagle-eating-a-fish-in-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/02\/adult-bald-eagle-eating-a-fish-in-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Adult Bald Eagle Eating A Fish In Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first glance veteran readers of Feathered Photography may think you’ve seen these images before. Believe me, you haven’t.<\/p>\n

Back in February of 2011 I was fortunate enough to capture a 20 image sequence of an adult Bald Eagle eating a carp in midair at Farmington Bay WMA. In the past I’ve posted some of those images on my blog but since then I’ve largely ignored the rest. Last night I stumbled across them again and decided that some of the others deserved to see the light of day. None of these photos have ever\u00a0been seen by anyone but me.<\/p>\n

All\u00a0images are presented in the order they were taken.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

On this day competition between eagles\u00a0for the few available fish was fierce\u00a0so there was a lot of squabbling on the ice. And to make\u00a0things worse the gulls were harassing the eagles mercilessly for every little morsel of fish\u00a0so this adult took off with its fish with the obvious intention of eating it\u00a0in flight in order\u00a0to avoid its tormentors. As it began to fly by me the eagle took its first bite out of the carp which caused scales and other fish debris to\u00a0fall by the wayside.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The eagle had a firm grip on the fish with its left foot but it struggled a little with the right one and during the process of grasping it with that foot I got a good look at those impressively large, sharp\u00a0and deeply curved talons.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The head of the fish was bony and tough so I had enough time to take several photos as it tried to take that first bite.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

There was a pesky gull hot on the tail of the eagle during the entire\u00a0series of images which added to the confusion and excitement. I wish we could see the eagle’s eye through the flight feathers but that flash of the yellow bill will have to suffice.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS\u00a0USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This gull and others were just plain nasty. They were noisy and aggressive, to the point that I actually saw gulls biting the tails of eagles in flight, twice!<\/p>\n

I actually learned something new while preparing this post of images I hadn’t looked at carefully before. For almost eight years now I’ve always assumed\u00a0that this eagle’s first bite took out the eye of the fish (and I’d made that claim on two previous posts). I’d read somewhere that they often eat the eye first and it looked to me like that was exactly\u00a0what it was doing. But this time I decided to confirm it…<\/p>\n

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so I cropped in heavily on the previous image and lo and behold the eye was still there. The eagle had only bitten off the front of the head and left the eye behind. Yet another example of the perils of making assumptions!<\/p>\n

I’m glad I made the effort to go back and review these images and post some of them that are new to my blog but there’s no question that many of the best\u00a0shots in the\u00a020+\u00a0photo series\u00a0are those I’ve posted previously. If you’ve never seen them before\u00a0it might be worth your time to click this link<\/a> and\u00a0check them out. They’re some of my favorites of all time.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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At first glance veteran readers of Feathered Photography may think you’ve seen these images before. Believe me, you haven’t.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54160,"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":[355,334,2782,392,394],"tags":[43,3696,3395,1008,146,169,400],"class_list":["post-54158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bald-eagles","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-bald-eagle","tag-competing-for-fish","tag-eating-fish-in-flight","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-flight","tag-gulls","tag-haliaeetus-leucocephalus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/bald-eagle-4380-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-e5w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54158","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=54158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}