{"id":90912,"date":"2020-11-02T06:21:57","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T13:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=90912"},"modified":"2020-11-02T07:01:56","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T14:01:56","slug":"hermit-thrush-acting-weird-and-a-possible-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/02\/hermit-thrush-acting-weird-and-a-possible-explanation\/","title":{"rendered":"Hermit Thrush Acting Weird And A Possible Explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plus a huge coincidence related to my daughter Shannon’s accident and resulting brain injury.<\/p>\n

Yesterday morning in northern Utah while I was driving slowly down an isolated road I flushed a Hermit Thrush near the road on my left. ‘He’ didn’t go very far and landed on the ground between two sagebrush where he was hidden from me. I slowly pulled my pickup forward in the hope I could find him again. After a few seconds I was barely able to see him through a narrow ‘tunnel’ of tall grasses and sagebrush.<\/p>\n

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He was on top of a low rock and I was very<\/em> surprised to discover that he was laying down. In my experience it’s highly unusual for a songbird to lay down like this, especially so soon after being startled and flushed by a potential threat such as my moving pickup. Typically at this point they’d be standing up and on high alert.<\/p>\n

I took several dozen shots of him laying down on the rock before he eventually…<\/p>\n

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put his wings out and…<\/p>\n

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began to move them up and down without standing up.<\/p>\n

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He did this with his wings…<\/p>\n

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four or five times. He wasn’t flapping fast and vigorously as if he was trying to take off – the flapping was too slow for that and besides, he still wasn’t standing up.<\/p>\n

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Eventually he raised his body off the rock but only slightly. Now for the first time we can see his right foot beneath him.<\/p>\n

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He never did stand fully erect on his legs.<\/p>\n

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But eventually…<\/p>\n

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he was able to take off.<\/p>\n

Both times when I saw him in flight he seemed to fly normally but while he was on the rock something seemed to be… off. So after I got home I looked at my photos carefully to see if I could figure out what might be going on.<\/p>\n

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In this highly cropped version of the first photo we see the ‘ankle’ joint poking out of a gap in the feathers that to my untrained eye seems unusual.<\/p>\n

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And in this large crop of photo #8 that gap or hole in the feathers continues to look strange to me but I still can’t figure out what was going on, if anything. I wondered if he’d been hit by a car but on Sunday morning that remote road had no traffic at all. I didn’t see another vehicle for the entire morning.<\/p>\n

Any thoughts from my readers? I wondered if some rehabbers out there would have any insight. When it comes to birds I do tend to become fixated on things like this so I’ll admit to being very curious.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – Six days ago I reported on the five year anniversary of my daughter Shannon’s accident<\/a><\/span><\/span> that resulted in a serious brain injury from which she very nearly died. A recent event in the news has caught the attention of my entire family because it’s such a huge coincidence related to her accident.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two days ago former Miss America, actress and TV star Leanza Cornett died from a similar accident<\/a><\/span><\/span>. Following are the similarities between the two events:<\/em><\/p>\n