{"id":91142,"date":"2020-11-08T06:35:31","date_gmt":"2020-11-08T13:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=91142"},"modified":"2020-11-08T09:44:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-08T16:44:29","slug":"battling-red-tailed-hawks-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/08\/battling-red-tailed-hawks-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Battling Red-tailed Hawks – Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

The portion of the fight that occurred on the ground.<\/p>\n

Three days ago I photographed a 13 minute battle between two immature Red-tailed hawks. The beginning of the fight which I covered in Part I<\/a><\/span><\/span> occurred at or near the top of a power pole while the extended conclusion I’m covering in Part II today happened on the ground.<\/p>\n

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In an effort to ease the transition between Part I and Part II I’ll begin with the last photo I posted yesterday. The hawk at bottom had been perched on top of the pole when the second hawk flew in from the right and attacked. Here their talons are locked as they begin their long, spiraling fall to the ground.<\/p>\n

I dislike naming wild birds but today I’m making an exception in an effort to make it easier to keep track of which bird is which. Even with names it won’t be easy because both young birds are about the same age, they look very much alike and once they’ve fallen to the ground vegetation often hides any identifying characteristics.<\/p>\n

Notice the untattered almost perfect tail of the attacking hawk in comparison to the frazzled ends of the tail feathers on the bird that was originally on the pole. Based on tarsi thickness falconer Laura Culley believes that the bottom bird might be a male so I’m going to call him Samson. She also believes that the attacking bird is likely a female so I’ll refer to her as Delilah.<\/p>\n

I felt I had to call them something<\/em>…<\/p>\n

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This photo, taken less than 5 seconds after the previous one, is the first shot I got after the birds hit the ground. They seem to be still trying to figure out what happened and what to do next. I can tell from subsequent photos that Samson is on the left with Delilah on the right.<\/p>\n

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This photo makes me laugh out loud. With that intimidating look and posture Samson seems to be saying “How dare you! There’s going to be hell to pay” for that sneak attack.<\/p>\n

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So he laid into her.<\/p>\n

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Here we see Samson’s tattered tail as he rushes her and she goes over on her back defensively.<\/p>\n

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There were several times when I thought one of them was using its beak as a weapon instead of just its talons. This is one of them. After this shot was taken all I could see for a while was a furious flurry of feathers sticking up out of the grass while they duked it out.<\/p>\n

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Finally I could see one of their heads but the photo is such a mixed up jumble of body parts it isn’t easy to tell which body to assign the head to. But the tattered tail on the left belongs to Samson.<\/p>\n

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Twenty nine photos later it seems to be an even match but at this point I can’t tell for sure which bird is which although I believe that’s Samson on the left.<\/p>\n

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Suddenly he seems to gain the upper hand as Delilah turns over defensively on her back.<\/p>\n

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At this point where he had her pinned down he started looking around as if he was searching for a way to get himself out of this mess.<\/p>\n

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Instead he turned his attention back to Delilah and…<\/p>\n

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really laid into her.<\/p>\n

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But she recovered.<\/p>\n

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Sixty three photos later Samson is on the right. Delilah finally decided she’d had enough and broke away from him. She flapped her way through the weeds on the left for a couple of feet and then took off to the west, apparently uninjured.<\/p>\n

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Samson watched her leave and then a few seconds later took off to the northeast.<\/p>\n

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He landed on a second power pole that fed electricity to a nearby barn. We can tell it’s Samson by his beat up tail. He also appeared to have no serious injuries.<\/p>\n

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I hesitate to compare this experience to other spectacular encounters I’ve had with birds over the last 13 years but I keep thinking it might be the most memorable and exciting experience of them all. It was certainly the longest and most intense raptor fight I’ve ever witnessed. My heart was pounding, to the point that I was fearful that many of my most important photos would be soft (they weren’t). Buck fever isn’t a good thing to have when you’re shooting action with a super telephoto lens.<\/p>\n

I was also surprised that both birds apparently escaped the brawl without serious injury. During the 13 minute brouhaha I kept thinking that after it was all over I’d find a dead or seriously injured hawk on the ground.<\/p>\n

I was so very relieved when it didn’t turn out that way.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

The portion of the fight that occurred on the ground.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91157,"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":[334,2782,394,450],"tags":[452,1008,140,768,5445,451,311],"class_list":["post-91142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fighting","tag-immature","tag-locked-talons","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/red-tailed-hawks-7526-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-nI2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91142","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=91142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}