{"id":76467,"date":"2019-09-30T05:52:18","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T11:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=76467"},"modified":"2019-09-30T06:09:47","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T12:09:47","slug":"snowy-egret-stalking-and-striking-at-a-i-dont-know-what-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/30\/snowy-egret-stalking-and-striking-at-a-i-dont-know-what-it-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowy Egret Stalking And Striking At A… I Don’t Know What It Is!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I always enjoy mysteries in my photos like this one, especially when they involve bird behaviors. And sometimes my readers even solve them for me.<\/p>\n

Five days ago I spent quite a while photographing Snowy Egrets hunting in duckweed and algae-covered water at Bear River MBR. The following nine photos were taken in a burst of 10 shots as one of the egrets rushed potential prey, stabbed at it with its bill and then reacted to the result. The photos are presented sequentially and the total elapsed time (including the missing photo) was exactly one second.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, 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

I don’t know for sure how the egrets could somehow sense prey (usually small fish) beneath the thick matt of duckweed and algae but they were pretty darned good at it. This bird has somehow detected potential prey beneath the duckweed directly in front of “him” and is beginning to move toward it.<\/p>\n

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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

Egrets are incredibly fast in these situations so I was lucky to only clip one wing.<\/p>\n

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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

Here he’s about to strike but I still don’t see what captured his interest. It was probably just a very small disturbance in the floating duckweed.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/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

I thought two things were interesting in this shot: he turned his head at almost a 45\u00b0 angle to make the strike and he fully deployed his alulae to get as much “traction” in the air with his wings as possible to stop his forward momentum. In the previous photo the alulae weren’t flared at all.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/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

He came up empty but something? popped up out of the water directly in front of the spot where his bill had plunged into the water.<\/p>\n

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I thought I might be able to tell what it was if I cropped tightly on it but I can’t. The fact that it isn’t sharp because it’s out of my plane of critical focus doesn’t help. I can’t even tell for sure if it’s an animate or an inanimate object, although I suspect the latter.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, 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

1\/10th of a second later the egret has pulled away and the “item” is falling back beneath the duckweed.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, 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

By the next shot it has disappeared, leaving behind only a few drops of duckweed-laden water falling back to the surface.<\/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

And now it’s completely gone. The only evidence it was ever there is the tiny spot of blue water and the egret showed no further interest in it. The bird is soft but I wanted to include this shot anyway to complete the series.<\/p>\n

I can only guess what it was and in the end it doesn’t matter much, if at all, but stuff like this makes me curious as hell. My best guess is that it’s a small piece of wood that was “upended” when the egret struck one end of it but wood on the refuge is almost nonexistent and it doesn’t float. It doesn’t appear to be a fish or any other organism I recognize.<\/p>\n

Any thoughts? Perhaps it’s something completely obvious and I’m just oblivious to it. If so it won’t be the first time…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I always enjoy mysteries in my photos like this one, especially when they involve bird behaviors. And sometimes my readers even solve them for me.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76473,"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":[338,334,392,375],"tags":[1348,49,4249,1444,4760,287],"class_list":["post-76467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-snowy-egrets","tag-alulae","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-duckweed","tag-egretta-thula","tag-mystery-prey","tag-snowy-egret"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/snowy-egret-5415-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jTl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76467","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=76467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}