![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/swainsons-hawk-2920-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"swainsons-hawk-2920-ron-dudley.\\"")
<\/p>\nThe last Swainson’s Hawk I photographed this year turned out to be more interesting than I initially thought it was.<\/p>\n
As I mentioned on another recent post I seldom stop my pickup for hawks perched on utility poles. But a little over two months ago as I approached this dark morph Swainson’s Hawk on a pole in Box Elder County I could tell ‘he’ had prey of some kind so out of curiosity I checked him out with my lens.<\/p>\n
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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 Even through my long lens I didn’t immediately identify the prey as a small snake. At first I thought he was tugging on intestines of a small mammal in his talons that I couldn’t see. If they were intestines they seemed unusually white but I didn’t think much about it until my session with him was over and I zoomed in on my photos on my camera screen in the field. Until then I had no idea it was a snake.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 He used a very similar technique to eat the snake as he would for intestines so I was completely fooled. I half expected him to deliberately drop the “intestines” since raptors often reject mammal intestines before consuming the rest of the animal but this guy…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 gobbled down the entire food item. Even when he got to the tapered tail I didn’t recognize it as a snake. With my shutter slapping in front of my eyes as I fired quick bursts my view of him was often interrupted and at the time my only concern was to keep him in frame and in focus.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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 As birds typically do whenever anything threatens their eyes he closed his nictitating membrane when the snake’s thrashing tail got too close to his left eye.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I can’t ID the snake as to species with any confidence but every snake I’ve seen in this area over the years has been a gopher snake so if I had to guess I’d go with the odds and say that’s what it was. Most gopher snakes have creamy bellies like this presumed baby gopher snake. But I won’t rule out some other species of snake, in part because it seems so light colored.<\/p>\n Part of the reason I’m interested in this photo series is that I’ve never before seen a Swainson’s Hawk eating a snake. I’ve photographed Red-tailed Hawks eating snakes<\/a><\/span><\/span> and American Kestrels with snakes as prey<\/a><\/span><\/span> but never a Swainson’s Hawk. In the past I’d only seen them eating grasshoppers and voles.<\/p>\n But Cornell’s Birds of the World reports on a study in Washington state where 20% of the diet of Swainson’s Hawks in that area consisted of reptiles so I shouldn’t be surprised.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note: While composing this post I had a brain fart. Six years ago I actually did photograph a Swainson’s Hawk eating a snake<\/a><\/span><\/span> but I’d forgotten about it. If you follow the link it’s the last photo in the series but the rest of them are pretty interesting too.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last Swainson’s Hawk I photographed this year turned out to be more interesting than I initially thought it was.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/swainsons-hawk-2931-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"swainsons-hawk-2931-ron-dudley.\\"")
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