{"id":62282,"date":"2018-08-14T04:58:23","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T10:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=62282"},"modified":"2018-08-14T06:49:33","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T12:49:33","slug":"gray-catbird-up-close-and-a-little-mystery-id-like-some-help-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/14\/gray-catbird-up-close-and-a-little-mystery-id-like-some-help-with\/","title":{"rendered":"Gray Catbird Up Close (and a little mystery I’d like some help with)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Too close, actually. And that’s unusual for the very\u00a0shy catbird.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I usually\u00a0have a very difficult time getting close to catbirds but five days ago in the Wasatch Mountains this one.approached me rather than the other way around. I’m sure the draw was the few\u00a0berries left on a scraggly serviceberry bush that was very close to me. All three of these images have at least one nit that needs picking but I’ll let them slide and just enjoy seeing the nice closeup detail on such a bashful bird.<\/p>\n

Normally I’d crop a narrow\u00a0slice off of\u00a0the left side of the frame for slightly better composition but this photo as presented\u00a0is full frame (uncropped) and I wanted to leave it that way to demonstrate how close the bird came in to me.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This\u00a0photo of the same bird is nearly full frame but I did crop a little off of the left. I sure came close to clipping one of those toes.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But then I did clip both that toe and a wing primary when it began to take off. However, I’d say I was lucky to get as much of the bird in frame as I did.<\/p>\n

Ok, now to\u00a0that little mystery.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the exact same image as the first one above. Had you noticed that weird little orange structure hanging down from the underside of the leaf at upper right? I’m trying to figure out what it might be.<\/p>\n

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The only possibility I can think of is that it’s a leaf gall but it doesn’t resemble any galls I’ve seen before, especially because of those spikey\u00a0projections\u00a0hanging down that almost resemble the spines of\u00a0some sea urchins and because of the fuzziness surrounding its round orange body – that fuzziness\u00a0looks like a fungal characteristic.<\/p>\n

I’m stumped. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – I had to laugh at that berry in deep shadow on the right with a couple of sepals arranged in such a way\u00a0to give it the appearance of a tiny ravenous bird with its hooked\u00a0beak open\u00a0flying in to attack the berry at lower left. Maybe it’s just me…<\/em><\/p>\n

Addendum: Facebook follower Tana Peery Hunter thinks the\u00a0 orange mystery object\u00a0resembles Sputnik. I wish I’d thought of that!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Too close, actually. And that’s unusual for the very shy catbird.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62284,"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":[334,3523],"tags":[3526,3525,4141,4140,311],"class_list":["post-62282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-gray-catbird","tag-dumetella-carolinensis","tag-gray-catbird","tag-leaf-gall","tag-serviceberry","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/gray-catbird-1330-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gcy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62282","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=62282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}