{"id":70906,"date":"2019-04-13T04:57:25","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T10:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=70906"},"modified":"2019-04-13T04:57:25","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T10:57:25","slug":"western-meadowlark-triple-wing-stretch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/13\/western-meadowlark-triple-wing-stretch\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Meadowlark Triple Wing Stretch"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Western Meadowlark gave me just about every stretching pose in the book. And no, my title isn’t meant to imply that this bird has three wings.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,\u00a0Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I found this cooperative Western Meadowlark three years ago today on Antelope Island. (S)he was close, in good light and whether it’s a good thing or not, natural backgrounds don’t come much cleaner or more uniform than this one. I look at the background as a positive because it sets off the various poses of the meadowlark so well. Opinions on that may vary.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 320, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/p>\n

Suddenly he began to leisurely stretch his right wing downward as he drew one claw on his right foot along most of the length of the outside primary feather on that wing. That was something I’d never seen before so I documented it using several additional photos in a previous post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised that it was his right wing, the one we can see best. In my experience birds usually stretch their far wing just to be contrary…<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 320, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/p>\n

But then he stretched his left wing downward too and even though we can’t see this wing as well he fanned his tail and raised his right wing slightly to make up for it.<\/p>\n

At this point I figured the stretching display was over and he would fly off, as birds often do soon after stretching.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 320, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/p>\n

But I was wrong. Instead he gave me a bilateral vertical wing stretch. He didn’t raise his wings all the way but I’m ok with that because if he had I’d probably have clipped his wingtips.<\/p>\n

The other thing I appreciated was that he didn’t turn his face away from me during the entire performance, as they so often do.<\/p>\n

Good bird.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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This Western Meadowlark gave me just about every stretching pose in the book.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70909,"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":[3,334,370],"tags":[31,4500,669,311,323],"class_list":["post-70906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-western-meadowlarks","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-stretching-poses","tag-sturnella-neglecta","tag-utah-2","tag-western-meadowlark"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/western-meadowlark-9957-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-irE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70906","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=70906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}