{"id":77179,"date":"2019-10-17T05:59:39","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T11:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=77179"},"modified":"2019-10-17T06:54:52","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T12:54:52","slug":"pipits-galore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/17\/pipits-galore\/","title":{"rendered":"Pipits Galore"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been waiting for migrating American Pipits to show up in good numbers this fall and yesterday morning they finally came through in spades.<\/p>\n

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Typical of pipits around here at least they were foraging for food on the flats but small flocks of them periodically and regularly flew in to land on a large rockpile where they didn’t seem interested in food at all. They may have been warming in the morning sun but I didn’t see a lot of evidence of that. I think they just like piles of rocks and dirt.<\/p>\n

I got a lot of varying backgrounds in my photos of them including blue sky…<\/p>\n

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and dead vegetation in warm light. About the only type of background I didn’t get was anything green and alive.<\/p>\n

As usual one of my goals was takeoff and flight shots but this bird kept the end of its tail hidden…<\/p>\n

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even when it almost<\/em> took off. This was a false start and the pipit didn’t actually take off until later. Yes, I missed that shot.<\/p>\n

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Kind of an unusual composition with the bird facing directly into a pile of rocks but it’s unusual enough that I actually like it. I think.<\/p>\n

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When birds scratch their heads they nearly always close their eyes so it’s unheard of for me to post scratching shots. When this pipit forgot to close them it caught my attention.<\/p>\n

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American Pipits are nondescript and inconspicuous little birds with a soft call so many folks barely notice them. But on this rockpile I was often able to photograph them with clean backgrounds which helps to make them stand out. This one seemed to use the rock as a pedestal and gave me…<\/p>\n

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several nice poses while it was perched there.<\/p>\n

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There were often multiple pipits perched on the rockpile at the same time and they were quite prone to squabbling. As a result they always seemed to be concerned about where the other birds were on the pile so they often stretched vertically like this so they could see other pipits over nearby rocks.<\/p>\n

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Their cryptic coloration made them very difficult for me to spot on the similarly colored rocks. Often I didn’t even know they were there until they flew off.<\/p>\n

As we can see in this individual the nail (claw) of the rear toe or hallux of this species is highly elongated. Some were even longer than this.<\/p>\n

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I caught this one in the middle of a rouse.<\/p>\n

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Like many songbirds this species is largely insectivorous in the summer but switches to eating seeds for most of the rest of the year. Surprisingly even when it was as cold as it was yesterday morning there were a variety of insects flying around including this presumed mosquito but the pipits seemed to ignore them.<\/p>\n

Here the insect is actually sharper than the bird but I’m fine with that because the mosquito caught my interest so I wanted a closer look at it. I got good looks at many of the mosquitoes that morning because there were a bunch of them flying around inside my pickup and biting me as I was photographing the pipits.<\/p>\n

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But this one looks different from the ones that were biting me. In Utah we have three predominant mosquito species but this one appears to be slightly larger, some of the appendages seem a little too long and I don’t recognize those stripes on the abdomen.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it isn’t a mosquito at all. Maybe it’s a type of crane fly (mosquito hawk) but it’s much smaller than those I usually see. I dunno, I’m no entomologist.<\/p>\n

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My attempts at takeoff and flight shots I like were stymied all morning. I often had to choose between 5 or 6 birds to aim my lens at and I usually chose the wrong one. Something always seemed to go wrong. I would have been happy with this one if the legs of the bird weren’t hidden and the shooting angle wasn’t quite so steep.<\/p>\n

But I shouldn’t and won’t complain. The last three mornings I’d been out shooting I was mostly bird-skunked but yesterday morning I had oodles of pipits and took almost 1200 shots of them in 55 minutes.<\/p>\n

So the only thing I’ll bellyache about is all the image culling that awaits me.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: I misspelled “Pipit” in the introductory sentence in the email that went out to my subscribers. I fixed it in my post but it was too late for the email. Hate it when I do that!<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’ve been waiting for migrating American Pipets to show up in good numbers this fall and yesterday morning they finally came through in spades.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77183,"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":[3566,334,2782],"tags":[1789,2712,1344,1008,4782,4781,311],"class_list":["post-77179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-pipits","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-american-pipit","tag-anthus-rubescens","tag-cryptic-coloration","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-long-claw-on-rear-toe-or-halux","tag-mosquito","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/american-pipit-0233ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-k4P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77179","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=77179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}