{"id":65310,"date":"2018-11-03T05:54:14","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T11:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=65310"},"modified":"2018-11-03T07:04:12","modified_gmt":"2018-11-03T13:04:12","slug":"sunflowers-goldfinch-gold-this-time-of-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/03\/sunflowers-goldfinch-gold-this-time-of-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunflowers – Goldfinch Gold This Time Of Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critters\u00a0use sunflowers for a variety of reasons. They don’t have to be\u00a0in bloom\u00a0to be useful to birds and wildlife\u00a0but when they are they sure brighten up some of my photos. When they aren’t they allow me to photograph feeding behavior like I\u00a0did yesterday.<\/p>\n

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This coyote on antelope island was using the sunflowers and their shade as cover while hunting or trying to hide from me at dawn. In this case I believe it was doing\u00a0both.<\/p>\n

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In some years Antelope Island seems like it’s almost completely\u00a0blanketed\u00a0in yellow from the blooming sunflowers in late summer and\u00a0fall and blooming mullein\u00a0earlier in the summer. And Pronghorns love to eat the sunflowers, going from plant to plant to nip\u00a0the higher\u00a0flowers off.<\/p>\n

And of course a variety of birds perch on sunflowers, especially Western Meadowlarks, Burrowing Owls and sometimes Horned Larks on the island. But in my experience they seldom do it until the late fall when the flowers have faded and withered. It’s my theory that the stems are a little too flexible for them to make very stable perches\u00a0when they’re still green. But the other factor of course is those delectable sunflower seeds that aren’t ready until late fall.<\/p>\n

Then some birds go nuts over the dried out sunflower heads loaded with seeds and that includes this American Goldfinch and\u00a0its buddies I photographed yesterday near Farmington Bay WMA.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

Goldfinches aren’t so colorful this time of year but they sure are hungry as they try to gear up for cold temperatures.\u00a0It could snow any day now and we’ve often had snow by now in previous years. This one spent a long time working over these two seed heads.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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 ate so many seeds I’d\u00a0be tempted to call it a glutton if I didn’t know what they’re preparing for. There were still\u00a0many seeds left\u00a0when the bird got\u00a0fussy and…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

decided to look for better pickings (the next three shots aren’t very good but they help to tell the story).<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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 flew a short distance to the seed head at upper left but…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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 didn’t like that one\u00a0much and thought it could do better\u00a0so it looked around again.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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 time it mostly jumped and I damned near didn’t keep it in frame.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

But this time\u00a0it found goldfinch gold – four seed heads in a cluster and\u00a0still containing many seeds.<\/p>\n

I didn’t do it yesterday but I remember many times in the past photographing birds\u00a0as they fed\u00a0on sunflower seeds while I had a gob of\u00a0the same thing\u00a0in my own mouth (yes, I do like munching on sunflower seeds).<\/p>\n

I’m not sure\u00a0why,\u00a0it always made me feel just a little bit silly but I had to smile about our common addiction too.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – The difference between their sunflower seeds and mine is that mine are purchased and loaded with salt. I’ve been diagnosed with chronic low sodium and ordered to consume lots of salt, within reason. I’ve known folks who would kill for that diagnosis.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Critters use sunflowers for a variety of reasons. They don’t have to be in bloom to be useful to birds and wildlife but when they are they sure brighten up some of my photos. When they aren’t they allow me to photograph feeding behavior like I did yesterday.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65313,"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":[3823,3,334,374,2782,392,373],"tags":[1757,31,98,258,1686],"class_list":["post-65310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-goldfinch-birds","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-coyotes","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-pronghorns","tag-american-goldfinch-2","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-coyote","tag-pronghorn","tag-sunflowers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/american-goldfinch-9893-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gZo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65310","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=65310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}