{"id":89748,"date":"2020-09-24T04:42:58","date_gmt":"2020-09-24T10:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=89748"},"modified":"2020-09-24T08:31:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T14:31:46","slug":"a-truly-badass-american-kestrel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/24\/a-truly-badass-american-kestrel\/","title":{"rendered":"A Truly Badass American Kestrel"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Kestrels are known for their badassery but yesterday morning this ballsy male cranked it up a notch. Or three.<\/p>\n

Yesterday more than made up for some pretty slow days in the field recently. I managed to photograph a Green Heron, a diving kingfisher, a one-eyed pelican and a one-eared weasel before the morning was half over. But even though the Green Heron was a lifer for me, weasels are notoriously hard to find much less get in the viewfinder and diving kingfishers are always a huge challenge for the photographer my most exciting event of the morning was an extremely aggressive male kestrel playing hardball with a Red-tailed Hawk.<\/p>\n

So the heron, weasel, kingfisher and pelican photos will have to wait for another day.<\/p>\n

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I don’t know the sex of the hawk but I’m going to refer to ‘her’ as a female. She was far away (these photos have been cropped substantially) but she was facing my general direction so I trained my lens on her in case she took off toward me.<\/p>\n

But this male American Kestrel immediately took major exception to her presence in the tree and began to attack her. Again and again.<\/p>\n

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He came at her fast and from almost every direction so the much larger and slower hawk could only react defensively. She was out classed and out maneuvered every time.<\/p>\n

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She couldn’t turn on her perch fast enough to meet him head-on so about all she could do is raise her wings defensively and close her nictitating membranes to protect her eyes.<\/p>\n

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Even on those rare occasions when she was facing his direction of approach he was fearless. Here he’s swooping in…<\/p>\n

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and in the next photo in the burst he appears to be so close to her she could almost reach up and snatch him out of the air. But because of his incredible speed and maneuverability it never happened. In fact she never even tried.<\/p>\n

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His ability to avoid crashing into the branches and twigs surrounding and protecting her while he was flying at such crazy speeds was nothing short of incredible. When I study this photo carefully I simply can’t imagine how he got where he is without having a lethal collision with some part of the tree.<\/p>\n

Here it looks like a collision with one of the branches in front of him is almost inevitable but…<\/p>\n

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he was able to pull up quickly enough to avoid them.<\/p>\n

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I actually managed to photograph one of the attacks in its entirety. The kestrel perched nearby to plan his next attack so I was able to get both birds in the frame.<\/p>\n

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He waited until she was looking away before launching his attack.<\/p>\n

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Once again he had to ‘thread the needle’ of branches and twigs so he…<\/p>\n

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pulled his wings into a more aerodynamic shape that would both help to prevent a collision and increase his speed.<\/p>\n

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At the last split-second he flared slightly upward and brought his legs and feet into position for the strike.<\/p>\n

She still doesn’t know he’s coming.<\/p>\n

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He struck the back of her head with enough force to snap her head forward and downward which…<\/p>\n

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helped him to make a clean getaway. All she could do is look surprised and nonplussed and perhaps even a little embarrassed over being outfoxed by such a tiny adversary.<\/p>\n

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Then he proceeded to rub salt in the wound by perching nearby and appearing to taunt her.<\/p>\n

She watched him much more carefully after that last attack.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: there were actually several kestrels harassing the red-tail but I was looking through my lens the entire time so I couldn’t keep track of which one was which. But based on feather gaps in the kestrel I believe it’s likely that all of the attacks in these photos were made by the same male kestrel. I could be wrong but I don’t think so.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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American Kestrels are known for their badassery but yesterday morning this ballsy male cranked it up a notch. Or three.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89761,"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":[340,334,394,450],"tags":[28,5362,452,131,140,211,451,311],"class_list":["post-89748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-american-kestrel","tag-attacking-a-hawk","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-fighting","tag-male","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/american-kestrel-9467-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-nly","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89748","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=89748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}