{"id":64032,"date":"2018-09-30T05:48:44","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T11:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=64032"},"modified":"2018-09-30T06:13:18","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T12:13:18","slug":"eight-of-my-favorite-rough-legged-hawk-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/30\/eight-of-my-favorite-rough-legged-hawk-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight Of My Favorite Rough-legged Hawk Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the time of year I start to get antsy about the return of the Rough-legged Hawks. Several years ago I read on Birds of North America Online that by the end of September most of them have left their breeding grounds in northern Canada and Alaska and are headed our way for the winter. That\u00a0bit of bird trivia\u00a0stuck with me so the end of this month always triggers thoughts of\u00a0their return. In anticipation I reviewed some of my favorite photos of them last night.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed that trip down memory lane so I thought some of my readers might also. Over the years I’ve posted each of these images on Feathered Photography so long-time readers\u00a0may have\u00a0already seen some, most or even all of them.<\/p>\n

Some of the photos aren’t great technically but there’s something special (for me at least) about each one and I’ll explain what it is.<\/p>\n

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This hawk was kiting in the wind while hunting\u00a0when it\u00a0lifted its head in an effort to look over the raised road behind me. Doing so contorted its body profile\u00a0into a modified “S” shape that I don’t remember ever seeing in a raptor in flight.\u00a0This bird makes me smile every time I see the image.<\/p>\n

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This shot was obviously taken in low light. With the bird banking in flight the spread wings and flared tail provide a wonderful\u00a0look at the dorsal feather colors and patterns which make the bird stand out against a very similarly colored background.<\/p>\n

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Takeoff shots are a piece of cake compared to landing photos. I won’t go into all the details as to why but suffice it to say that I probably\u00a0have\u00a0several thousand raptor\u00a0takeoff shots and only a handful of landing photos. I’m not fond of this soon-to-be perch but I was still\u00a0delighted to catch a raptor during the landing process.<\/p>\n

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\"\"I like this shot for a lot of reasons related to behavior and unusual elements in the photo. Right in the middle of parallaxing me by rotating ‘his’ head (I think the young bird was intrigued by the sound of my shutter) he succumbed to an irresistible urge to yawn.\u00a0I’ve photographed many owls and some buteos during parallax\u00a0but this was the first and only time one of them combined it with a yawn.<\/p>\n

That’s bison fur on top of the post – two clumps of it. I’ll bet there aren’t many photos out there of hawks with bison fur on the perch. It was a very\u00a0cold morning so the fur\u00a0was covered with frost.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the same hawk in a different pose. I’m including this\u00a0shot to allow him more dignity than he exhibited in the previous photo.<\/p>\n

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I believe this was the only time I’ve ever photographed a hawk of any species actually eating in flight (though I do have some of an eagle eating a fish in flight). Usually they carry prey in their talons but this bird had just transferred the vole from talons to beak and\u00a0immediately after this shot was taken it swallowed the rodent.<\/p>\n

And something else unusual – the vole is a “pinkie” (or just barely past that stage), a baby vole that was apparently somehow robbed from the nest. This was also the first time I’d seen a raptor\u00a0with a baby rodent so this image is a ‘twofer’ of sorts.<\/p>\n

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This is the only time I’ve photographed a Rough-legged Hawk on prey as large as this rabbit. Nearly always I see them with small rodent prey. The image is a little graphic but not so much that I don’t appreciate the stark reality of the behavior.<\/p>\n

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One of my favorite photos of any raptor. This RLH was obviously preening\u00a0its tail feathers by re-zipping the hooks between the barbules.\u00a0It had already worked on the feathers closest to the one in its beak and you can see that they’re now in better shape than the rest of them.<\/p>\n

I have other versions of this image with a looser crop (aesthetically this one’s pretty tight) but I appreciate the better detail and more intimate look at the behavior the tighter crop provides.<\/p>\n

Sometimes in the winter\u00a0we’re almost awash in Rough-legged Hawks here in northern Utah but last year they were pretty scarce. I hope that’s not the case again this winter.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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This is the time of year I start to get antsy about the return of the Rough-legged Hawks.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64060,"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":[334,392,358],"tags":[534,700,578,579,866,243,3868,255,256,459,269,311,315,330],"class_list":["post-64032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-rough-legged-hawks","tag-buteo-lagopus","tag-eating-in-flight","tag-kiting","tag-landing","tag-migration","tag-parallax","tag-pinkie","tag-preening","tag-prey","tag-rabbit","tag-rough-legged-hawk","tag-utah-2","tag-vole","tag-yawn"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/rough-legged-hawk-2492-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gEM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64032","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=64032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}