{"id":82477,"date":"2020-03-05T05:28:10","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T12:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=82477"},"modified":"2020-03-06T05:37:37","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T12:37:37","slug":"american-white-pelican-on-landing-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/05\/american-white-pelican-on-landing-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"American White Pelican On Landing Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sometimes liken American White Pelicans to B–52 Stratofortresses – they often fly at great heights and they’re not very agile in flight but man are they ever impressive during landings.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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 got this one in my viewfinder three years ago (2\/28\/17) as it was coming in to land on one of the ponds at Farmington Bay WMA. Unlike many smaller birds these massive and ponderous 16+ pounders do very little flapping as they approach the water’s surface.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

Instead they take advantage of their 9′ wingspan as they mostly glide during their approach which means….<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

there’s very little variation in flight posture during the process. About the only difference between the first three photos in this series is the background and water color – the pelican’s wing and foot positions are almost identical in all of them.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, 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

Finally as its airspeed slowed the pelican flared into a much more interesting flight posture as it got close to the surface. I managed to get quite a few shots after this one but in many of them there were other pelicans in the frame.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen any pelicans yet this year but I keep watching for them. It shouldn’t be long now.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – For those interested, I’m still without a vehicle and will be until late today. Ford assured me they’d have the necessary parts to make repairs on my pickup when I dropped it off but in the end they didn’t have them in stock so they had to be ordered which added 24 hours to my time being grounded.<\/em><\/p>\n

As reminded by one of my readers yesterday one of my long time mantras is “I’d rather push a Ford than drive a Chevy” but at the moment I’ll admit that mantra is being tested…<\/em><\/p>\n

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I sometimes liken American White Pelicans to B–52 Stratofortresses – they often fly at great heights and they’re not very agile in flight but man are they ever impressive during landings.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82485,"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":[3374,338,334],"tags":[420,1008,146,579,423,311,3373,3001],"class_list":["post-82477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-white-pelicans","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","tag-american-white-pelican","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-flight","tag-landing","tag-pelecanus-erythrorhyncos","tag-utah-2","tag-weight","tag-wingspan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/american-white-pelican-4081-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-lsh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82477","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=82477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}