{"id":84120,"date":"2020-04-18T05:28:31","date_gmt":"2020-04-18T11:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=84120"},"modified":"2020-04-18T07:04:38","modified_gmt":"2020-04-18T13:04:38","slug":"wild-turkey-takeoff-and-flight-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/18\/wild-turkey-takeoff-and-flight-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Turkey Takeoff And Flight Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

The setting for this series, photographed yesterday morning in the mountains, is cluttered with branches and twigs but that’s part of the point of this post.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

In the early part of the morning we found two hen Wild Turkeys perched high in the still-bare trees. Both birds were buried in masses of branches and twigs, to the point that they were difficult to see and almost impossible to focus on.<\/p>\n

My best hope for even slightly interesting photos was to prefocus on one of them and then take my thumb off the focusing button (I use back button autofocus) and hope it would take off in the same plane it was perched. Even then my chances of getting unobstructed shots were slim to nonexistent but I tried anyway. What did I have to lose?<\/p>\n

I’m only including this first photo of the turkey beginning to take off and fly to the ground to show what a tangle of branches and twigs she was perched in.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Getting out of that mess was slow for a bird taking off so 1\/10th of a second later she hadn’t made a lot of progress. I like the way she’s reaching out for freedom with her left leg.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the most “out in the open” shot in the series.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Her attempt to get out of there was noisy as her wings and body crashed through the branches and we see an old leaf falling below her tail that had been dislodged by her struggle to escape her twiggy prison (that leaf can be seen still attached between her legs in the previous photo.)<\/p>\n

With all the branches and twigs so close to her I’d have had little chance to get her sharp if my focus point had been active.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

After this shot I lost her in all the branches. She flew to the ground and joined her companion who had abandonded her perch high in an adjacent tree a few seconds earlier.<\/p>\n

Getting out of there in one piece was quite an accomplishment for such a huge and ungainly bird but I imagine it paled in comparison to getting up there in the first place. My guess is that both turkeys roosted in their lofty perches the previous night and hadn’t yet left when we found them.<\/p>\n

I can’t imagine how they were able to get up there the previous evening without injuring a wing. Or a leg. It’s no wonder that their feathers sometimes look scruffy and beat to hell.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Addendum: My friend Jim DeWitt made in insightful comment on this post on Facebook – “I’ve always thought the choice of night time roost was a calculation: how hard can the bird make it for a predator to get in. Worry about getting out in the morning if you are still alive.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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The setting for this series, photographed yesterday morning in the mountains, is cluttered with branches and twigs but that’s part of the point of this post.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84125,"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":[6,334,3664],"tags":[5060,146,2744,5059,294,851,311,2743],"class_list":["post-84120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-wild-turkeys","tag-back-button-focusing","tag-flight","tag-meleagris-gallopavo","tag-roosting-in-trees","tag-stansbury-mountains","tag-taking-off","tag-utah-2","tag-wild-turkey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/wild-turkey-8264-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-lSM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84120","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=84120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}