1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 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>\nWhen I first spotted “him” yesterday morning at Bear River MBR he was close but on the wrong side of my pickup for photography. As I tried some creative driving to get him into my viewfinder he flew to the far side of the canal and mostly buried himself in the vegetation. Here he’s beginning to slowly come out, as evidenced by that huge, raised foot.<\/p>\n
All of these photos have a close and busy background but it’s typical habitat for the species so I can live with it.<\/p>\n
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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 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
I soon learned why he came out into the open – his intention was to go elsewhere.<\/p>\n
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1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 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
I call this shot “The Big Stretch”. In this photo and the following one I didn’t have enough room in front of the bird for a composition I like but at least I didn’t clip any body parts.<\/p>\n
One thing surprised me about this shot. I wasn’t particularly close to the bird so at f\/7.1 I expected to have enough depth of field to get the wings sharp, even with them in this position. But they’re soft. That tells me that they’re probably soft because of motion blur due to insufficient shutter speed when I expected 1\/2500 sec to be plenty fast for such a large bird. Live and learn.<\/p>\n
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1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 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
I was able to get four shots of him in flight and the two I’ve included here were my favorites, despite their compositional issues.<\/p>\n
American Bitterns are at or near the top of my list of most elusive species for photography. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen one out in the open and been able to get reasonably good photos so this bird made my morning.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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The American Bittern is solitary and cryptically colored. Throw in its secretive nature and inaccessible habitats and you have a species that I rarely see so getting photos of one taking off and in flight made my day yesterday.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71468,"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":[1367,338,334],"tags":[1368,49,1369,146,2738,311],"class_list":["post-71465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-bitterns","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","tag-american-bittern","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-botaurus-lentiginosus","tag-flight","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/american-bittern-3485-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-iAF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71465","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=71465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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