{"id":91331,"date":"2020-11-13T06:21:02","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T13:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=91331"},"modified":"2020-11-13T09:18:23","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T16:18:23","slug":"multiple-attacks-kestrel-and-magpie-vs-merlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/13\/multiple-attacks-kestrel-and-magpie-vs-merlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Multiple Attacks – Kestrel And Magpie vs. Merlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t have many two falcon days but yesterday was one of them. Throw in all the aggressive action and I couldn’t ask for much more.<\/p>\n

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I consider myself lucky if I get one chance at quality photos of a Merlin about every two years and yesterday this female Merlin became my biennial prize.. Originally she was on a different perch but when she landed here she was calm and approachable. I think the cold morning had something to do with her stickiness.<\/p>\n

I photographed her on this perch for over eleven minutes but she gave me very little pose variation. I think she was just trying to warm up in the morning sun.<\/p>\n

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She was completely unflappable (pun intended), even when a Black-billed Magpie buzzed her aggressively and…<\/p>\n

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repeatedly. She seemed so unconcerned she acted like it was nearly too much trouble to even turn her head to watch the persistent magpie flying at her.<\/p>\n

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The last time the magpie buzzed her she finally reacted. Here she’d turned on her perch to face the magpie as it was doing something on or near the sloping hill below her. I kept my lens trained on the Merlin and my eye plastered to the viewfinder so I don’t know what the magpie was actually doing down there.<\/p>\n

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She may not have cared much about that pesky magpie but another bird incoming from her right got a completely different reaction.<\/p>\n

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In contrast to the magpie she took this potential threat very seriously.<\/p>\n

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The aggressor turned out to be an angry female American Kestrel who took serious exception to her presence on the perch. The kestrel is probably a resident bird and the Merlin is migrating through so I suspect this hunting perch ‘belonged’ to the kestrel.<\/p>\n

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The Merlin fell backwards when she took both feet off the perch in order to present her talons defensively to the incoming kestrel.<\/p>\n

I love this photo even though I clipped one of the kestrel’s wings and we can’t see her eye.<\/p>\n

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The Merlin fell completely off her perch and flew off.<\/p>\n

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Then the kestrel claimed the perch from which she’d successfully displaced the larger falcon.<\/p>\n

I was lucky on this series to have already removed my teleconverter before all the action began. I’d removed it in anticipation of takeoff and flight shots but having the shorter focal length served the same purpose when all this aggressive behavior began. If my teleconverter had still been attached to my camera I almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to keep as much of both birds in the frame as I did.\u00a0And I’d have had significantly less depth of field to get both birds as sharp as possible.<\/p>\n

Serendipity strikes again.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

I don’t have many two falcon days but yesterday was one of\u00a0them. Throw in all the aggressive action and I couldn’t ask for much more.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91356,"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":[340,6,334,363,2782,394,2221],"tags":[28,1405,57,2222,1008,140,1228,792,5453],"class_list":["post-91331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-black-billed-magpies","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-merlin-diurnal-raptors","tag-american-kestrel","tag-attack","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-falco-columbarius","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fighting","tag-merlin","tag-serendipity","tag-utah"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/merlin-8838-for-thumbnail-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-nL5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91331","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=91331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}