{"id":81226,"date":"2020-01-30T06:08:50","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T13:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=81226"},"modified":"2020-01-30T09:22:17","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T16:22:17","slug":"some-recent-avian-potpourri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/30\/some-recent-avian-potpourri\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Recent Avian Potpourri"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mixed bag of birds I’ve photographed over the past month.<\/p>\n

Blog followers have seen a few of these birds in different poses recently but each of the following photos is new to Feathered Photography. All were taken at either Bear River MBR or one of the local ponds I visit regularly.<\/p>\n

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The ghostly apparition of a Great Blue Heron on the ice in dense fog.<\/p>\n

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Much better light on the same species in flight. A chunk of ice is hanging down from some of the pectoral plumes.<\/p>\n

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Redheads in a “‘courting party” during early spring migration characterized by tight grouping, alert postures, high levels of aggressiveness and frequent kinked-neck calls and head-throws.<\/p>\n

Groupings of migrating adult Redheads consistently exhibit male-biased sex ratios and I was interested to see that this courting party, although a small sampling of only 4 males and 3 females, reflected that bias. Christmas Bird Counts of Redheads in winter consistently average about 79% males.<\/p>\n

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One of the males in the previous photo performing an aggressive head-throw while guarding his mate from other nearby males.<\/p>\n

These two Redhead photos are for you Lyle Anderson, in response to your request yesterday for “more duck photos, please.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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A Rough-legged Hawk with the snow-covered Promontory Mountains in the background.<\/p>\n

This was one of those times when I had trouble getting sharp photos because of the cold. It was warm inside my pickup but a little earlier that morning I’d seen 10\u00b0 F outside and that temperature disparity consistently resulted in soft shots for a while. Out of the 76 photos I took of this hawk this is the sharpest one I managed to get. Many were much softer. Maddening!<\/p>\n

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I’ve posted a series of other photos of this Pied-billed Grebe performing a wing flap after bathing but yesterday I noticed that this one shows a curled foot sticking up out of the water. I thought that foot added just a little extra pizzazz. Churning his webbed (actually lobed) feet is part of what’s keeping him that far out of the water.<\/p>\n

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An adult Red-tailed Hawk on a very old and rusty piece of farm equipment. This plow has only two very large ploughshares or shovels (in the raised position for transport in this photo) so it would have been used to break the land many years ago. There’s’ a lot of history and extremely difficult labor represented here.<\/p>\n

A raptor on antique farm equipment – for this old Montana farm boy and bird photographer it doesn’t get much better than that.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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A mixed bag of birds I’ve photographed over the past month.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81233,"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":[338,334,1094,359,450,1243,358],"tags":[4929,4928,251,451,1242,4930,269,311],"class_list":["post-81226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-great-blue-herons","category-pied-billed-grebes","category-red-tailed-hawks","category-redhead-waterfowl","category-rough-legged-hawks","tag-antique-farm-equipment","tag-greata-blue-heron","tag-pied-billed-grebe","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-redhead","tag-redhead-courting-behavior","tag-rough-legged-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/roughg-legged-hawk-8174-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-l86","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81226","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=81226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}