{"id":64817,"date":"2018-10-21T05:34:12","date_gmt":"2018-10-21T11:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=64817"},"modified":"2018-10-21T07:23:55","modified_gmt":"2018-10-21T13:23:55","slug":"northern-mockingbirds-are-still-here-in-northern-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/21\/northern-mockingbirds-are-still-here-in-northern-utah\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Mockingbirds Are Still Here In Northern Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m surprised they haven’t\u00a0migrated south\u00a0by now but I’ve seen several of them the last few days\u00a0in the mountains and on the valley floors. According to Cornell’s Birds of North America Online the migratory habits of mockingbirds aren’t well understood (they have surprisingly little info on the subject)\u00a0but I know that\u00a0around here I’m not used to seeing them this late in the year.<\/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

I photographed this bird yesterday morning in Northern Utah. I believe all seven of these images are of the same bird. ‘He’ (I don’t really know its sex) kept returning to the same bush and often to the same couple of\u00a0perches on that bush.<\/p>\n

This shot is pretty much just a ‘bird on a stick’ but…<\/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

the first time he landed here he showed me just a little more personality with this angled\u00a0head pose.<\/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

I spent ten minutes with him as he popped in and out of the bush but I was mostly frustrated for a variety of reasons. I liked the leaf colors when he landed here but he\u00a0had his butt to me and\u00a0refused to turn his head in my direction.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, 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

Seven\u00a0minutes later when he returned to a similar perch\u00a0and struck an almost identical pose he actually did turn to look my way but I was stymied by the foreground leaves in front of his feet.<\/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

This was his other favorite perch while I was with him. I’m including this shot because I love the extreme\u00a0angle of that tail. It almost looks like\u00a0the tail is\u00a0broken at its attachment to the\u00a0body. I’m not sure I’ve ever\u00a0photographed a bird bending its tail at 90 degrees to its body except for possibly a few times during preening (and as Susan Stone pointed out in a comment below, wrens do it regularly).<\/p>\n

My biggest disappointments with this bird were with takeoff shots. I had hopes for two of them but I clipped a wing in both of them and each was a little soft.<\/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

These two photos illustrate one of the problems with photographing takeoffs. When the shutter fires you don’t know what angle the bird will fly from the perch or\u00a0whether the wings will be up or down so you also don’t know where to leave the most room in the frame. It’s a guessing game.<\/p>\n

This time he went upwards and his wings were\u00a0raised when the shutter clicked\u00a0but…<\/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

when he took off from the same perch again he flew horizontally and his wings were down. That’s a lot of room in the frame that you need to allow for, especially when you’re relatively close to the bird as I was.<\/p>\n

I wish I’d been a little further away for the takeoff shots. That would have given me more room in the frame and a little more depth of field to hopefully get the bird sharper.<\/p>\n

Next time…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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I’m surprised they haven’t migrated south by now but I’ve seen several of them the last few days in the mountains and on the valley floors<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64823,"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":[334,4267],"tags":[146,866,4023,702,2738,311],"class_list":["post-64817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-northern-mockingbirds","tag-flight","tag-migration","tag-mimus-polyglottos","tag-northern-mockingbird","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/northern-mockingbird-7839-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gRr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64817","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=64817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}