{"id":69975,"date":"2019-03-13T06:39:54","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T12:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=69975"},"modified":"2019-03-13T07:54:08","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T13:54:08","slug":"mrs-red-tailed-hawk-meets-mr-murphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/13\/mrs-red-tailed-hawk-meets-mr-murphy\/","title":{"rendered":"Mrs. Red-tailed Hawk Meets Mr. Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fourteen photos of this spectacularly beautiful hawk perched, taking off and in flight. But yesterday Mr. Murphy showed up.<\/p>\n

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I’ve encountered this unusually colored Red-tailed Hawk in past years but poor light and bad luck prevented me from getting the flight shots I wanted so badly. Almost certainly it’s the same female who has nested in this area in previous years. Her overall very dark red (rufous) colors are beautiful and distinctive so I’ve ached, literally ached, to get better shots of her.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I had my chance. At first she was perched on some lovely lichen-covered rocks with her back to me and I fully expected her to take off away from me, which she did.<\/p>\n

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But she unexpectedly flew only a short distance to my left and landed on another rock and this time she was facing me.<\/p>\n

If she took off from here while I was there I’d have my chance.<\/p>\n

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Eventually she did but the instant she took to the air Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s law arrived on the scene and put the kibosh on my hopes of getting the high-quality flight shots I was after. As you’re about to see my string of bad luck was an impressively long one.<\/p>\n

The following five shots are sequential photos in the burst without any skips and there are very few skips in the four shots following those five. All photos are presented in the order they were taken.<\/p>\n

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The entire rest of the series was a train wreck, beginning with this clipped wing. This one really hurt.<\/p>\n

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Nothing clipped here but I had to add canvas on the left for composition which I really dislike doing.<\/p>\n

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Another clipped wing.<\/p>\n

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And another.<\/p>\n

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Nothing clipped but once again I had to add canvas.<\/p>\n

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Finally, I didn’t clip any body parts and I had enough room to get a composition that worked but wouldn’t you know it, her nictitating membrane was closed!<\/p>\n

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A single flight feather, clipped at the tip.<\/p>\n

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Here her left wing is more than just clipped, it’s cut off.<\/p>\n

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Not enough room to the left to get a decent composition and the rocks and vegetation at bottom prevent me from adding canvas.<\/p>\n

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Another clipped wing.<\/p>\n

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Not nearly enough room below the hawk.<\/p>\n

Needless to say Mr. Murphy isn’t one of my dearest friends but whenever I have a lens in my hands he regularly makes an appearance. Since this beautiful hawk is apparently nesting in the area (I didn’t see her mate yesterday but her old nest is nearby) I can only hope for another chance with her.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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    \n
  1. \u00a0Murphy’s\u00a0 Law – “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. <\/em>The presumption is that Murphy was a man but I suppose a case could be made that it should be “Mrs. Murphy”…<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0Every bird photographer is familiar with at least some of the frustrations I had yesterday. I just like to bitch and moan about mine.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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

    Fourteen photos of this spectacularly beautiful hawk perched, taking off and in flight. But yesterday Mr. Murphy showed up.<\/p>\n

    Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69979,"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":[334,450],"tags":[452,146,4476,3181,451,605,311],"class_list":["post-69975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-flight","tag-flight-series","tag-murphys-law","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-take-off","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/red-tailed-hawk-4899-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-icD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69975","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=69975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}