![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/house-finch-1826b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"house-finch-1826b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nYet another example of the almost unbelievable athleticism of birds.<\/p>\n
Today’s post isn’t about high quality images – these are documentary quality only. Instead it’s about the lightning-quick gymnastic abilities of birds.<\/p>\n
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1\/3200, 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 Yesterday morning in the mountains the only reason I trained my lens on this juvenile House Finch was to attempt to get a positive ID. ‘She’ was far away so this version of the photo is cropped significantly. Even when my avian subjects are quite small in the frame I often attempt takeoff and flight shots so when I thought she might launch I instinctively fired off a quick burst.<\/p>\n Nothing of particular interest here, right? Just a common, fairly nondescript bird perched on a diagonal branch and not doing anything interesting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1\/3200, 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 But less than 1\/10th of a second later she had launched and already performed a jaw-dropping aerial maneuver. In not much more than her own body length she managed to rotate her body in flight so that her entire ventral surface was exposed to me. And notice that, as birds nearly always do, she kept her head perfectly level during the entire maneuver.<\/p>\n The amount of coordination and athletic skill required for such a maneuver is almost unbelievable and keep in mind this is a very young bird. Only a few weeks ago she was a tiny bobblehead in the nest, so weak and uncoordinated that she had great difficulty lifting her head to be fed by her parents.<\/p>\n I suppose some folks aren’t greatly impressed by such things, thinking something like “she’s a bird and birds do things like that.” But every time I capture something like this in my photos I marvel at the athletic abilities of birds. It’s something I find impossible to take for granted.<\/p>\n The two obvious questions, how did she do it? and why did she do it? remain a mystery to me and that’s part of the fascination of birds..<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yet another example of the almost unbelievable athleticism of birds.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/house-finch-1827b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"house-finch-1827b-ron-dudley\\"")
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