{"id":78051,"date":"2019-11-08T06:05:03","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T13:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=78051"},"modified":"2019-11-08T06:05:03","modified_gmt":"2019-11-08T13:05:03","slug":"a-few-recent-birds-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/08\/a-few-recent-birds-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Recent Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is one of my roughly semiannual attempts to give my readers a feel for some of the birds I’ve been photographing recently that didn’t make it to my blog. None of these photos are top shelf so don’t expect any award winners but some aren’t bad, others are interesting and a few document some of my frustrations in the field (as always I had more of that type than I could include here).<\/p>\n

All of them were taken in the last eleven days.<\/p>\n

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A Song Sparrow on a diagonal perch. I’ve been attracted to simple images like this that highlight the bird and a single natural perch element that stretches across the frame diagonally since I was cutting my bird photography teeth at Nature Photographers Network (NPN) beginning about 12 years ago.<\/p>\n

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Another simple shot featuring a male Gadwall and his reflection.<\/p>\n

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And adult White-crowned Sparrow on an attractive natural perch that seems to mimic some of the out of focus elements in the background.<\/p>\n

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A couple of Canada Geese in flight. A common species often ignored (or disdained) but I often attempt to get multiple geese in flight that are both sharp – not easy to do with such large birds at my focal length. Here I had the added bonus of getting catch lights in the eyes of both birds.<\/p>\n

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A Mountain Chickadee in flight, just barely but both feet have left the perch so I classify it as a flight shot. The bird had been facing to our left as it extracted the Douglas Fir seed in its bill from the cone on the left edge of the frame when without warning it twisted 180\u00b0 on its perch and took off to the right. Damn they’re fast!<\/p>\n

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After all these years photographing birds I still don’t have a quality flight shot of a Northern Flicker that highlights their beautiful underwing and tail colors but this time I came close. If my shutter had fired a few nanoseconds later it might have happened.<\/p>\n

Bird photography is littered with “almosts”.<\/p>\n

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But my biggest frustration of the last eleven days was this magnificent Golden Eagle perched on an ugly utility pole yesterday morning. My only chance for a quality shot or two was to get the eagle in flight after it took off. It was facing the right direction for that to happen but either the bird thought the wire in front of it would obstruct the takeoff or it deliberately chose to foil my attempt out of orneriness because just before it took off it…<\/p>\n

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turned around on the beam of the pole, pooped disdainfully in my direction and…<\/p>\n

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took off mostly away from me. To add to my frustration my lens slipped on the slope of my pickup window lens rest (my usually trusty “noodle”) just as the eagle took off so all of my flight shots were slightly soft.<\/p>\n

So that’s how my last eleven days have gone. I hope yours have been better.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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This is one of my roughly semiannual attempts to give my readers a feel for some of the birds I’ve been photographing recently that didn’t make it to my blog.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78057,"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":[334,1336,1753,642,4807,1496,523,350],"tags":[1337,1754,153,2051,1144,290],"class_list":["post-78051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-canada-goose","category-gadwall","category-golden-eagles","category-mountain-chickadee","category-northern-flickers","category-song-sparrows","category-white-crowned-sparrows","tag-canada-goose-2","tag-gadwall-2","tag-golden-eagle","tag-mountain-chickadee","tag-northern-flicker","tag-song-sparrow"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/mountain-chickadee.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-kiT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78051","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=78051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}