{"id":66645,"date":"2018-12-08T04:40:16","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T11:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=66645"},"modified":"2018-12-08T05:20:17","modified_gmt":"2018-12-08T12:20:17","slug":"loggerhead-shrike-courtship-feeding-behavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/08\/loggerhead-shrike-courtship-feeding-behavior\/","title":{"rendered":"Loggerhead Shrike Courtship Feeding Behavior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female Loggerhead Shrikes accept prey from the male when they’re forming a pair bond and throughout the incubation and nesting period. I don’t know precisely which courtship stage this pair was in but they were clearly having a bonding moment.<\/p>\n

I’ve posted other photos of this behavior but these four images are new to my blog. I’m not including image techs because my camera settings were inappropriate for the situation. I screwed up but the photos still turned out.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This is the female, photographed in April of this year on Antelope Island. In this species sexes are similar but males are larger and females usually have some brown tones in their black primaries that males don’t share. Notice the brown tones on her wingtips. They’re subtle but they’re there.<\/p>\n

I knew there was another shrike close by but at the time I didn’t know it was a male or that it was\u00a0bonding with this female. I should have considered that possibility\u00a0because she was obviously watching him carefully wherever he went but I missed that behavioral cue.<\/p>\n

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Suddenly the male came from out of nowhere and landed right next to her with a treat that I believe was a small insect grub. In a tender moment for both of them\u00a0he fed it to her almost immediately and quite daintily.<\/p>\n

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She had her head turned away from me as she was swallowing it but here she’s still gulping it down.<\/p>\n

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And then the betrothed\u00a0couple seemed to enjoy each other’s company for a few moments before the female flew off, soon followed by the male. I see and photograph adult shrikes feeding their offspring more often than I do their courtship feeding so these photos were a\u00a0welcome addition to my behavioral portfolio.<\/p>\n

Besides I love shrikes, nasty little wannabe raptors that they are. Just kidding (sorta) about that “nasty” part but you should see some of the things I’ve seen…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I don’t know precisely which courtship stage this pair was in but they were clearly having a bonding moment.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66654,"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":[3,334,392,346,391],"tags":[31,733,409,206,1132,4050],"class_list":["post-66645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-courtship","tag-lanius-ludovicianus","tag-loggerhead-shrike","tag-pair-bond-formation","tag-telling-males-from-females"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/loggerhead-shrike-5568b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-hkV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66645","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=66645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}