{"id":75099,"date":"2019-08-29T04:54:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T10:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=75099"},"modified":"2019-08-29T05:34:28","modified_gmt":"2019-08-29T11:34:28","slug":"goldfinches-woodpeckers-and-a-stem-from-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/29\/goldfinches-woodpeckers-and-a-stem-from-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"Goldfinches, Woodpeckers And A Stem From Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose yesterday could be called a comedy of errors but I didn’t think it was funny. It only makes me feel slightly better to know that many of them were just bad luck.<\/p>\n

It’s almost a tradition for me to call a relatively small cloud that blocks the sun, ruins the light, and then follows me all morning wherever I go in my pickup while I’m looking for birds, a “cloud from hell”. Well yesterday it wasn’t a cloud from hell, it was a thistle stem from hell.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

It\u00a0 was a slow day for birds in the mountains except for one area where a few birds eventually made their appearance. One of them was this American Goldfinch that unexpectedly flew in to feed on thistle seeds.<\/p>\n

For over half of the time I spent with this bird he was facing me on the thistle flower. I got some fairly interesting shots but I’m not particularly fond of this head-on posture so I was hoping he would eventually turn sideways on the flower to give me a more interesting side view.<\/p>\n

But see that damn thistle stem on the right? I didn’t even think about the problem it might cause if the bird eventually turned on the flower.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, 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

When he eventually did give me nearly a side view that stem put an annoying shadow on his butt and\/or tail. Maybe I’m oversensitive to shadows on my birds but they really annoy me. My eye goes to them immediately.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, 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

That shadow was always there to ruffle my feathers. Even though the breeze was sometimes moving the thistle stems around and occasionally the shadow disappeared for a split second I never got any decent poses (or light in the eye) when it happened.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/2500, 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 goldfinch did move to a more attractive flower on the same plant for a few moments but apparently those seeds weren’t ripe enough so almost immediately he moved back to the other flower.<\/p>\n

I spent eleven minutes with this bird and took 562 shots while he was on the thistle so by the time it was over I was a very frustrated photographer.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/2500, 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

But that’s only part of the story. While I was photographing the goldfinch this Downy Woodpecker flew into a bush almost directly behind the thistle so I had to choose which bird to focus my lens on. I ended up going back and forth and as chance would have it missed all opportunities I might have had with the woodpecker while it was more in the open and didn’t have annoying shadows on its face. This is the best shot I managed but its bill and part of its chest are in deep shade.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/8000, 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

And in the middle of it all a couple of Lesser Goldfinches landed in a tree almost directly behind the woodpecker bush. They were the first Lesser Goldfinches I’d seen this year so I’d love to have been able to get a few nice shots of them but they were far too distant for anything but documentary photos.<\/p>\n

When I eventually left this spot I’d taken 626 photos but I’ll probably delete nearly every last one of them. And for a variety of reasons my luck didn’t get any better for the rest of the morning.<\/p>\n

Every bird photographer on the planet has had days like this but knowing I have company doesn’t make it any easier to take.<\/p>\n

Maybe bellyaching about it will help me to move on.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I suppose yesterday could be called a comedy of errors but I didn’t think it was funny.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75111,"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":[3823,334,1784,392,4696],"tags":[1757,1785,4699,4698,4697,4700,311],"class_list":["post-75099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-goldfinch-birds","category-birds","category-downy-woodpecker","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-lesser-goldfinch","tag-american-goldfinch-2","tag-downy-woodpecker-2","tag-feeding-on-seeds","tag-flower","tag-lesser-goldfinch","tag-thistle","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/american-goldlfinch-0018b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jxh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75099","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=75099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}