![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/photographing-the-tanagers-2-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"photographing-the-tanagers-2-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nExcept I’m going to reverse the order to “The Ugly, The Bad and the Good” for this blog post. We might as well end on a high note.<\/p>\n
I arrived home early yesterday afternoon after 3 1\/2 days of camping and birding near the Continental Divide between southwest Montana and Idaho. As always I was “boondocking” – staying in a relatively remote dispersed camping site without hookups to water or electricity. It was my first serious and extended test of my new (to me) camping trailer and on this trip I was camping alone. As always there were high and low points.<\/p>\n
As I was leaving my campsite to come home yesterday I bent the hell out of the right rear leveling jack on my trailer. Coming in had been no problem but going out I had to approach the gravel road at a different angle and the jack hit a mostly buried boulder that had no give so it was the jack that was damaged. This trailer is a little longer and lower than my old one and I’m still getting used to it. I’ll have to replace the damaged jack and I’m not looking forward to it. With a bad back it won’t be any fun.<\/p>\n
Cows. Damn cows! For various reasons I didn’t sleep well at night on the trip so I relied on taking an afternoon nap sometime between 1 and 3 PM to compensate for it. But every afternoon right on schedule a herd of mooing, bellowing cows and their calves appeared out of the trees to chomp on the lush grass in the open clearing of my campsite and within feet of my trailer. I swear they were on some kind of daily migration schedule and holy hell can they ever make a lot of extremely unpleasant noise! I never got a lick of sleep, not once.<\/p>\n
Good friend Nancy DeWitt describes cow bellowing as “the most idiotic, annoying sound I\u2019ve ever heard an animal make” and I agree with her.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In all the years I’ve been going to the Centennial Valley and the surrounding mountains I’ve never seen so few birds as I did on this trip. And those I did find were mostly uncooperative. In the 3 1\/2 days I was there I put 550 miles on my pickup, largely on dirt and gravel roads, looking for birds and mostly failed. I haven’t reviewed my photos on the big screen yet but to be honest I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I got any images to be proud of other than those of the Western Tanagers in my camp.<\/p>\n
I’ve always said that camping trailers are a lot like photo gear because compromise is a big part of both. All camping trailers have strengths and weaknesses but on this trip I found more of the latter than I wanted to. Or expected.<\/p>\n
On one day I had a generator problem that took me a while to figure out so without any power other than my trailer batteries I couldn’t recharge my laptop. That put me behind so I almost wasn’t able to publish that day’s blog post.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It takes more than a lack of birds to keep me from enjoying a camping trip to this area. As I always do I loved the solitude, the wide open spaces, the beautiful scenery and the incredible display of stars at night.<\/p>\n
The trailer furnace actually worked as it should this trip! If it had failed again I’d have been in deep doodoo.<\/p>\n
I met a few nice, friendly and interesting folks on this trip but one of them stands out. Early one morning while looking for birds I visited the dam at Lower Red Rock Lake. There was a single bird photographer standing in front of his tripod and dressed in camo about 100 yards from where I turned around so I scoped him through my big lens to see if I might know him. I didn’t.<\/p>\n
But when I returned to the area later in the morning and visited the nearby campground in my quest for birds I noticed the same photographer sitting in his pickup at one of the campsites. On a whim I decided to walk over and ask him if he’d found any interesting birds down at the dam.<\/p>\n
As I approached him he walked toward me with a big grin on his face and asked “Is it the famous Ron Dudley?”. I’ll admit my jaw probably dropped because we were both over 300 miles from home and out in the middle of nowhere so I had no idea how he knew who I was. Turns out he’s been following Feathered Photography for years (which I was unaware of) and he knew it was me because he noticed my HARRIER license plate.<\/p>\n
What a nice guy James Stevens turned out to be! He said he was in the Centennial because of all the things I’ve said about the valley over the years on my blog. We jawboned for quite a while. My pickup was about out of gas and he even helped me lift my 13 gallon tank of spare gas (about 90 lbs.) to the top of my storage box so I could fill the pickup tank using gravity feed. His willingness to do so may have spared me from reinjuring my back. Or having to walk 40 miles to the nearest gas station…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the avian high point of my trip was the Western Tanagers in my campsite.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There were three of them on the day I arrived, two males and a more reclusive female, and at least one of the males stuck around for most of the time I was there. They spent most of their time in the trees in the background but occasionally one, sometimes two, would land on this hugely convenient stump to look for insects in the grass below.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/photographing-the-tanagers-1-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"photographing-the-tanagers-1-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
As you can see I had it made. I just sat in my chair with my tripod in front of me and waited for one of them to appear. If I needed to go into the trailer for anything it was only a few steps away.<\/p>\n
I know this looks like a setup but believe me it isn’t.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/western-tanager-4595-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"western-tanager-4595-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/1600, f\/5.6, 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
The male tanagers were unusually tame and sometimes while looking for insects they plopped down into the grass so close in front of me that I couldn’t even come close to fitting the entire bird in the frame so I took a few head shots. This one is on the process of macerating a beetle before swallowing it. At this close range while shooting at f\/5.6 my depth of field is so shallow only his bill and the beetle are truly sharp.<\/p>\n
Ok, I’ve blathered on for much too long. Congrats (or condolences) if you had the sticktoitiveness to wade through this entire post.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Except I’m going to reverse the order to “The Ugly, The Bad and the Good” for this blog post. We might as well end on a high note.<\/p>\n