{"id":66317,"date":"2018-11-28T05:43:25","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T12:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=66317"},"modified":"2018-11-28T09:13:55","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T16:13:55","slug":"bald-eagle-eating-a-fish-in-flight-the-entire-12-image-series-for-the-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/28\/bald-eagle-eating-a-fish-in-flight-the-entire-12-image-series-for-the-first-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Bald Eagle Eating A Fish In Flight – The Entire 12 Image Series For The First Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plus alternate crops of two of them to show what else is (and isn’t) going on.<\/p>\n

Regular readers have probably guessed that my favorite photo series of all time is one I took of an adult Bald Eagle eating a carp “on the fly” at Farmington some years ago.\u00a0In the past I’ve divided those photos up into three different blog posts but I’ve never shown all of them or even most of them in sequence on the same post. Last night I was reviewing one of those older posts when I came across this\u00a0request in a comment from Marty K.<\/p>\n

“I\u2019d be interested in seeing the entire series of this eagle\/fish \u201cpas de dinner\u201d sometime.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I responded by telling her she could see\u00a0many of the\u00a0other images in an older post and I pointed out the link to her. But she answered with another comment that I didn’t see until last night:<\/p>\n

“I was thinking of the possibility of combining that post and this one to see the whole series in one place (she says, timidly \ud83d\ude09 ).”<\/em><\/p>\n

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The more I thought about it the more I thought it would be a good idea. Seeing them out-of-order and\u00a0disjointed in different posts certainly\u00a0didn’t tell the story very well. So here they are, all twelve of them, in the order they were taken. One of them is an image I’ve never posted before and I’ve provided alternate crops of two others. As per usual in a series some are better than others and there\u00a0are some\u00a0skipped images\u00a0that I didn’t include because I cut off body parts of the eagle.<\/p>\n

With this many photos I don’t have time to provide image techs for them individually but most are in the range of 1\/1250, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + 1.4 tc.<\/em><\/p>\n

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On this\u00a0frigid winter\u00a0day at Farmington eagles were feeding on carp on the ice but thieving and ravenous gulls\u00a0were constantly challenging them for their meals so this eagle took off with its fish and began to eat it in flight and hopefully in peace. I believe this was the first and only time I’ve seen an eagle of either species actually\u00a0eating in flight.<\/p>\n

This bird was a highly\u00a0skilled multitasker.<\/p>\n

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This just might be my favorite photo in the series. Here we see a scale falling away from the carp as the eagle buries its beak in its head.<\/p>\n

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There’s a lot of bone in the head and the eagle seemed to have a tough time getting through it so for better leverage\u00a0it…<\/p>\n

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tried to reposition its right foot higher\u00a0on the fish…<\/p>\n

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without much success at first. Now the scales are really flying off of the carp.<\/p>\n

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The eagle seemed to struggle a little with…<\/p>\n

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where on the fish to place its right foot.<\/p>\n

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But finally with that problem\u00a0solved it could begin to enjoy its meal.<\/p>\n

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But an alternative crop of the previous photo shows us that one of the pesky gulls had other ideas and came in close with the obvious intent of making the eagle drop the fish back onto the ice.<\/p>\n

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We can’t see the eagle’s eye through its flight feathers so part of its bill will have to do.<\/p>\n

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Those gulls were very aggressive.\u00a0Once on that morning I watched as a gull bit the tail feathers of an eagle\u00a0carrying a\u00a0fish\u00a0in flight and it looks like this one had the same intention but if it happened I didn’t see it.<\/p>\n

Here the eagle has a chunk of head in its bill and there’s another piece or two\u00a0falling away.<\/p>\n

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At this point the gull is about to give up and leave but…<\/p>\n

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it gave the eagle a piece of its mind as it did so.<\/p>\n

When I took these images and posted a few of the photos to my blog I said that the eagle had been attempting to dig out and eat the eye of the fish. I’d read that some birds do that and I made the assumption it was happening here too because that’s what it looked like.<\/p>\n

Like many assumptions it’s one I shouldn’t have made.<\/p>\n

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A huge crop of the previous image reveals that the eye was still undamaged but much of the rest of the head is gone.<\/p>\n

Very soon after this shot was taken the eagle veered away from me, probably to escape the following gulls. Besides, the buffer on my old Canon 7D had filled up so I was only shooting blanks anyway.<\/p>\n

Ok, credit where credit’s due. I owe this entire series to Mia. I had my lens on another eagle when Mia called my attention to this one coming our way. If she hadn’t called out “bird, bird” there’s not a chance I’d have seen it coming in. So I got the shots but she\u00a0didn’t because she’d filled her buffer on\u00a0yet another eagle.<\/p>\n

We’re both good about pointing out photo ops to each other but I get the best of the deal because she has better eyesight.\u00a0So she\u00a0tends to spot\u00a0them\u00a0more often and more quickly than I do.<\/p>\n

Thanks, Mia.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: The background for these photos is the Wasatch Mountains in shade.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Plus alternate crops of two of them to show what else is (and isn’t) going on.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21184,"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":[355,334,2782,392],"tags":[43,74,141,146,169,400,311],"class_list":["post-66317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bald-eagles","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-bald-eagle","tag-carp","tag-fish","tag-flight","tag-gulls","tag-haliaeetus-leucocephalus","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/bald-eagle-4372b-new-copyright-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-hfD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66317","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=66317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}