{"id":78871,"date":"2019-11-30T05:09:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T12:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=78871"},"modified":"2019-11-30T09:54:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T16:54:58","slug":"dark-morph-ferruginous-hawk-takeoff-and-flight-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/30\/dark-morph-ferruginous-hawk-takeoff-and-flight-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Morph Ferruginous Hawk Takeoff And Flight Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

The dark color morph of the Ferruginous Hawk is unusual, significantly less than 10% of the population in North America. Since Ferruginous Hawks of any color are uncommon (Sibley calls them “rare”), the dark morph is a very narrow slice of that uncommon group and Ferruginous Hawks in general are such regal and impressive hawks I’ve been enamored of this bird ever since I found “him” a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n

And he continues to stick around. I’ve found him in the same area on three different occasions recently.<\/p>\n

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All that should explain in part why I’m posting this series even though I wasn’t particularly close to the hawk while he was perched or in flight. I found him on this juniper fence post six days ago in the west desert near one of our island mountain ranges out there.<\/p>\n

As you can probably tell from his ruffled feathers and orientation on the post he was facing into the wind so there was a good chance he’d take off in my direction instead of turning around on the post and flying away from me.<\/p>\n

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And eventually he did.<\/p>\n

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Liftoff.<\/p>\n

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This is the single photo from this series that I posted four days ago. In this version I’ve reprocessed the image and cropped it differently.<\/p>\n

Ferruginous Hawks are known for having massive bodies, robust chests…<\/p>\n

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and a very wide gape that extends all the way back to or even slightly past their eye as we can see here.<\/p>\n

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In this photo I nearly clipped his left wing.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s beginning to…<\/p>\n

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bank slowly to his right so he’ll eventually fly across my field of view.<\/p>\n

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There isn’t much detail in some of the whites of his right wing in this photo but the whites aren’t blown. The same thing happens again in the last shot of this series.<\/p>\n

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In these last two photos I didn’t get any light in his eye but…<\/p>\n

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I liked them well enough to include them anyway, especially this one because of his steep banking angle which allowed us a good look at his flared white tail in good light.<\/p>\n

I’ve presented this series of eleven photos in the order they were taken but there are skips. Readers can tell where I’ve skipped images and how many I’ve left out by looking at the photo file numbers that can be seen by passing your cursor over the image if you’re using a mouse (that doesn’t work on most portable devices).<\/p>\n

Those shots were skipped mostly because of clipped or cut off wings. Hate it when I do that…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Image techs for these photos were: 1\/3200 – 1\/8000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender. Shutter speed shot up as the hawk gained elevation and the sky got brighter (I shoot in aperture priority).<\/em><\/p>\n

Note: Here’s a couple of photos of a much more typical light morph Ferruginous Hawk for comparison:<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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

The dark color morph of the Ferruginous Hawk is unusual, significantly less than 10% of the population in North America. Since Ferruginous Hawks of any color are uncommon (Sibley calls them “rare”), the dark morph is a very narrow slice of that uncommon group and Ferruginous Hawks in general are such regal and impressive hawks I’ve been enamored of this bird ever since I found “him” a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78882,"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":[334,377],"tags":[34,531,969,138,146,2738,311,4503,4835],"class_list":["post-78871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ferruginous-hawks","tag-aperture-priority","tag-buteo-regalis","tag-dark-morph","tag-ferruginous-hawk","tag-flight","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2","tag-white-tail","tag-wide-gape"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/ferrigonous-hawk-7768-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-kw7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78871","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=78871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}