{"id":8997,"date":"2012-11-08T15:19:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T22:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=8997"},"modified":"2012-11-08T15:19:43","modified_gmt":"2012-11-08T22:19:43","slug":"the-return-of-the-rough-legged-hawks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/08\/the-return-of-the-rough-legged-hawks\/","title":{"rendered":"The Return Of The Rough-legged Hawks"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most pleasant harbingers of winter for me is always the return of the Rough-legged Hawks.\u00a0 This species breeds in high subarctic and arctic regions so we don’t see them from about March through October but they usually winter around here in good numbers and I love to photograph this handsome buteo.<\/p>\n

There’s been a few “roughies” on Antelope Island for a couple of weeks now but this morning was the first time this year I’ve been able to get close enough for good photos.\u00a0 This bird chose to perch on the same dark rocks that I’ve been photographing Red-tailed Hawks on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in (same techs for all the images in this post)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I wasn’t quite as close as I’d have liked to have been for perched shots so I waited for take-off.\u00a0 And waited.\u00a0 And waited.\u00a0 Almost went to sleep…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

Finally, a couple of men on horseback were riding the trail behind the rock in the background and I figured they’d spook the bird.\u00a0 They did.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

At least I didn’t miss the moment of take-off, which is so easy to do when you have to wait for it for so long.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

I got five sharp shots after take-off and something unusual happened with each of them.\u00a0 Normally, you’re lucky to get one\u00a0image with the bird looking directly at you.\u00a0 Usually, they’re looking in the direction of flight but for some reason this hawk kept her eyes on me for the entire sequence.\u00a0 I can’t remember that ever happening before.<\/p>\n

I’ll quit jabbering for the rest of the series and simply present the images.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"rough<\/p>\n

And I ended the morning with some good looks at a relatively unusual dark morph Rough-legged Hawk, in flight.\u00a0 In the western US, dark morphs make up only about 10% of the population so it was exciting to see and photograph this one.<\/p>\n

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

One of the most pleasant harbingers of winter for me is always the return of the Rough-legged Hawks.\u00a0 This species breeds in high subarctic and arctic regions so we don’t see them from about March through October but they usually winter around here in good numbers and I love to photograph this handsome buteo. There’s been a few “roughies” on Antelope Island for a couple of weeks now but this morning was the first time this year I’ve been able to get close enough for good photos.\u00a0 This bird chose to perch on the same dark rocks that I’ve been photographing Red-tailed Hawks on.   \u00a01\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in (same techs for all the images in this post) I wasn’t quite as close as I’d have liked to have been for perched shots so I waited for take-off.\u00a0 And waited.\u00a0 And waited.\u00a0 Almost went to sleep…     Finally, a couple of men on horseback were riding the trail behind the rock in the background and I figured they’d spook the bird.\u00a0 They did.     At least I didn’t miss the moment of take-off, which is so easy to do when you have to wait for it for so long.     I got five sharp shots after take-off and something unusual happened with each of them.\u00a0 Normally, you’re lucky to get one\u00a0image with the bird looking directly at you.\u00a0 Usually, they’re looking in the direction of flight but for some…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,358],"tags":[31,534,969,269],"class_list":["post-8997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-rough-legged-hawks","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-buteo-lagopus","tag-dark-morph","tag-rough-legged-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-2l7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8997","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=8997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}