{"id":85138,"date":"2020-05-13T06:02:03","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T12:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=85138"},"modified":"2020-05-13T06:48:10","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T12:48:10","slug":"yellow-warbler-a-snack-and-then-a-vertical-takeoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/13\/yellow-warbler-a-snack-and-then-a-vertical-takeoff\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellow Warbler – A Snack And Then A Vertical Takeoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning I spent some time in the mountains looking mostly for songbirds. The focus limiter<\/a><\/span><\/span> on my lens and I had a couple of disagreements which I inevitably lost so I botched several of my most promising photo ops but I thought this encounter with a Yellow Warbler turned out to be a fun and interesting one.<\/p>\n

Yes, this series includes yet another vertical takeoff. Four days ago I posted a Yellow-rumped Warbler doing the same thing<\/a><\/span><\/span> but the two warblers were using different hunting techniques. The butterbutt was hawking insects from the air while this Yellow Warbler was picking off stationary prey from the foliage.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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

He spent quite some time digging around in this leaf cluster looking for tiny insects before he came up with…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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

this tiny snack we can see near the end of his bill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A huge crop of the previous photo reveals that the “bug” (aphid?) was actually stuck to the tip of his tongue.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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

When he began to look above him for another promising twig to land on so he could continue his search for food I fired off a quick burst in hopes of getting a takeoff shot.<\/p>\n

I usually fail miserably in these “spray and pray” situations because warblers take off so damned fast but I find that if I try hard enough, often enough and if I have enough shutter speed I occasionally get lucky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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

This time I managed to keep him in frame as he launched vertically although I wish I had a little more room above him for composition purposes. Those little buzz-saw wings must have really been churning since a shutter speed of 1\/4000 didn’t get them any sharper than this.<\/p>\n

Oh well, the most important parts of the bird are plenty sharp enough and the wing softness appropriately and accurately depicts incredibly fast motion.<\/p>\n

I’ll take it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s another composition of the same photo if you prefer. I think I like this version best, in part because it includes more of the perch he just left.<\/p>\n

Other than catching this warbler at takeoff I had another dose of serendipity in store for me yesterday. It’s usually a complete waste of time for me to even think about going shooting when the weather radar shows masses of clouds moving into the area, as was the case yesterday morning. But for some reason I went anyway and it turned out that I had good to great light for almost the entire morning.<\/p>\n

They say that mountains make their own weather and whoever “they” are, they’re right.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Yesterday morning I spent some time in the mountains looking mostly for songbirds. The focus limiter on my lens and I had a couple of disagreements which I inevitably lost so I botched several of my most promising photo ops but I thought this encounter with a Yellow Warbler turned out to be a fun and interesting one.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85143,"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":[6,334,392,3486],"tags":[5112,146,3172,5111,2589,3772,2738,311,2588],"class_list":["post-85138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-yellow-warbler","tag-aphid","tag-flight","tag-insect-prey","tag-lens-focus-limiter","tag-setophaga-petechia","tag-spray-and-pray","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2","tag-yellow-warbler"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yellow-warbler-1503-horizontal-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-m9c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85138","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=85138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}