{"id":99104,"date":"2021-06-10T05:42:28","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T11:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=99104"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:01:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T16:01:24","slug":"lazuli-buntings-in-red-rock-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/10\/lazuli-buntings-in-red-rock-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Lazuli Buntings In Red Rock Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this habitat finding oodles of Lazuli Buntings was a pleasant surprise. Now I know better.<\/p>\n

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In early June of 2010 I spent several days camping in Utah’s San Rafael Swell, commonly referred to as simply “The Swell”.\u00a0 This photo illustrates the typical habitat of the area pretty well with lots of eroded red rock buttes and spires in almost every direction. Bird photography was a primary goal of the trip so you can see why the backgrounds in most of my bird photos consisted of various shades of out of focus red rocks.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I liked those backgrounds well enough but other times they were a little… shocking.<\/p>\n

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Breeding Lazuli Buntings were common in some riparian areas near the San Rafael River. In some of my photos of them the background colors were closer to brown then they were to various shades of red.<\/p>\n

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But in others I had homogenous red and pinkish backgrounds that to this day I find a little incongruous. Even knowing the context, those backgrounds seem out of place to me so I can imagine the reaction of others who may not be familiar with where the photos were taken.<\/p>\n

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Whenever possible I tried to get other colors and textures in the settings of my photos but those opportunities were few and far between. I quite like this shot even though the male bunting’s tail and left leg have out of focus greenery in front of them.<\/p>\n

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We had our tripods set up in camp but as you can see, even here the various shades of the red rock would dominate the backgrounds of many of our photos. Most of our Lazuli Bunting photos were taken a little closer to the San Rafael river in the middle background.<\/p>\n

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It may sound like I’m complaining about the red rocks but believe me I’m not – besides birds those spectacular red rock formations were the other primary draw of the trip. This is a view of another part of The Swell with the riparian corridor of the San Rafael River far below.<\/p>\n

A view to die for if you ask me.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note:<\/em><\/p>\n

Folks who know me may wonder what the hell I was thinking when I bought the Toyota Tundra in photo #5. I’ve owned 13 full sized pickups in my long life and that Tundra was the only one that wasn’t a Ford.F-150. As far as pickups go the Tundra was OK but anything but a Ford just goes against the grain of this Montana farm boy so my experiment with Toyota was soon abandoned. Permanently.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

In this habitat finding oodles of Lazuli Buntings was a pleasant surprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99106,"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":[334,569],"tags":[435,571,211,572,5792,5793,573,284,5791,5794,311],"class_list":["post-99104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-lazuli-buntings","tag-ford-f-150","tag-lazuli-bunting","tag-male","tag-passerina-amoena","tag-red-rocks-of-utah","tag-san-rafael-river","tag-san-rafael-swell-2","tag-singing","tag-the-swell","tag-toyota-tundra","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/lazuli-bunting-3544-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-pMs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99104","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=99104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}