{"id":62008,"date":"2018-08-07T04:17:37","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T10:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=62008"},"modified":"2018-08-07T07:00:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T13:00:21","slug":"the-downy-woodpecker-and-the-feather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/07\/the-downy-woodpecker-and-the-feather\/","title":{"rendered":"The Downy Woodpecker And The Feather"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plus a surprise critter a few minutes earlier yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

This Downy Woodpecker series is something a little different from me – a bird small in the frame. But I like the composition and I think the behavior is interesting.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, 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

Yesterday morning in the Wasatch Mountains while I was attempting to photograph other birds this male Downy Woodpecker landed in a faraway tree. I was disappointed he wasn’t closer and almost didn’t train my lens on him but I’ve learned from experience that with birds you just never know what might happen to make your photos more interesting so I took a shot to check my exposure\u00a0but mostly just watched.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

He started doing some half-hearted preening and suddenly pulled out one of his feathers.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

He manipulated it in his beak for a second or two and then deliberately discarded it.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

It passed on the far side of the branch and he nonchalantly…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

didn’t even watch it fall to the ground.\u00a0Many birds seem to be fascinated by their own falling feathers but he sure wasn’t.<\/p>\n

The behavior of course is no big deal but I thought it made a composition that pleased me even more interesting. My primary nit about the series is that the leaves above him intersect a small part of his head but that doesn’t ruin the photos for me.<\/p>\n

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Thirty nine minutes earlier while I was in another area photographing birds I had a fun and noisy\u00a0surprise.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 188mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

A bull moose with still-small antlers came crashing out of the older and much taller\u00a0willows near the stream below me and began chowing down on all the young willow shoots around him. Although it may not look like he’s standing, he is – those young willows must have been almost 5 feet tall and he was standing\u00a0on a steep\u00a0slope.<\/p>\n

I never did get a good look at all of him and he nearly always had his back to me but for this photo he turned his head as he was munching and I even got a catch light in his eye.<\/p>\n

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1\/800, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 188mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Once, though it wasn’t when this shot was taken, he took a willow branch in his mouth and pulled it\u00a0through his teeth by moving his massive snout to one side\u00a0which stripped\u00a0at least\u00a03 feet of leaves off of that branch in an instant. I saw him do it through my lens and I saw the leafy branch before it happened and the completely naked branch after. I was very impressed by his feeding prowess.<\/p>\n

Moose are the largest member of the deer family on earth and they can eat as much as 70\u00a0pounds of food in a day. They truly are eating machines.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: Speaking of subjects “small in the frame” my good friend at Wickersham’s Conscience makes an excellent point in his post this morning about the importance context often has in our images. Talk about good timing!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I think it’s worth taking a look. Here’s the link<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Plus a surprise critter a few minutes earlier yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62019,"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":[334,1784,395,1649],"tags":[1785,4125,168,4126,211,786,1786,255,311],"class_list":["post-62008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-downy-woodpecker","category-miscellaneous","category-moose-mammals","tag-downy-woodpecker-2","tag-feather","tag-grooming","tag-how-much-do-moose-eat","tag-male","tag-moose","tag-picoides-pubescens","tag-preening","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/downy-woodpecker-8527b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-g88","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62008","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=62008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}