{"id":72639,"date":"2019-06-13T05:20:18","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T11:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=72639"},"modified":"2019-06-13T06:17:18","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T12:17:18","slug":"western-tanager-with-a-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/13\/western-tanager-with-a-bug\/","title":{"rendered":"Western Tanager With A Bug"},"content":{"rendered":"

A shorter post today. After yesterday’s very long one I decided to give both my readers and myself a break.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/1600, f\/6.3, 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<\/em><\/p>\n

The tanagers I’ve been photographing in my campsite usually hawked insects from the surrounding trees where they were difficult to photograph well. But occasionally one of them would land on this stump that was out in the open and then proceed to hunt for insects on the ground beneath it. Sometimes they’d return to the stump to eat it and sometimes they wouldn’t. This time this one did.<\/p>\n

They often manipulated their insect prey in their bills for quite a while before gulping it down and I wondered why. Most birds I’ve observed swallow insects much more quickly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then I realized they were often eating hard-shelled beetles. Perhaps they were cracking the exoskeleton and tasting their snack before swallowing but that’s only a wild guess.<\/p>\n

Yes, I’ve been posting a lot of tanagers lately but on this trip they’ve been my most cooperative birds. Besides I’ve never had this much luck with them before so they have my attention at the moment.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Note: I realize that beetles aren’t really “bugs”.\u00a0Only those insects in order Hemiptera are true bugs and that doesn’t include beetles. Even the ladybug isn’t really a bug. But in this context bug just sounded better to me so I went with it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

The tanagers often manipulated their insect prey in their bills for quite a while before gulping it down and I wondered why<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72643,"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":[334,392,4579],"tags":[683,2032,1557,211,2035,742],"class_list":["post-72639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-western-tanagers","tag-beetle","tag-idaho","tag-insect","tag-male","tag-piranga-ludoviciana","tag-western-tanager"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/western-tanager-5201b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-iTB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72639","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=72639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}