Coyotes Like Eggs For Breakfast Too

At 5:30 yesterday morning Mia and I almost decided to stay home rather than make the hour-long drive to Antelope Island because the area up north looked to be socked in with clouds (the “Farmington Curse” I’ve mentioned before) but after we picked up our traditional “shooting breakfast” (chocolate donuts) we chose to take our chances and go anyway – a choice I’m glad we made.

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Golden Eagle In Flight

The Golden Eagle has long been a nemesis species for me. Over the years I’ve had a handful of potentially spectacular opportunities with these birds but something has always gone wrong.

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Red-tailed Hawk – A Twisting Take-off After Prey

The sturdy, broad-winged buteos tend to be large raptors with correspondingly slower movements than most smaller birds. Most of the time when I’m watching them they’re hunting from an elevated perch or soaring overhead and in neither situation do they typically demonstrate much quickness or agility.

But they can put on quite the show when they need to.

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Male Osprey Landing At Nest

This is the nesting pair of Ospreys I photographed at Flaming Gorge, Utah two weeks ago today. The male was coming in for a landing to relieve the female on the eggs. The dark background was a deeply shaded mountain to contrast the bird that had a little more light on it.

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Oolitic Sand – The Perfect Idiot Trap

There’ll be no birds in today’s post, I’m afraid. It takes me an hour to get to the island from my home and it’s not unusual for me to have clear skies when I leave much before dawn and then have it be mostly socked in when I arrive at the Farmington Bay/Antelope Island area – a phenomenon I refer to as the “Farmington Curse”. That’s exactly what happened yesterday morning so I generally had poor light and got correspondingly low quality photos, which I deleted.

The only saving grace of the morning was some karmic justice I observed on the island.

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Clark’s Grebe Blowin’ In The Wind

Three days ago at Bear River Migratory Bird refuge I had some wind to contend with as I was photographing this Clark’s Grebe. It made the water a little choppy and would occasionally ruffle the feathers of one of the birds when it turned its back to the breeze.

The effect varied fairly dramatically.

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Western Meadowlark In Flight

I find getting quality photos of songbirds in flight to be almost impossible – they’re just too small and fast for me to lock on to long enough to get them sharp and near the middle of the frame so nothing is clipped. But I do keep trying and occasionally things work out.

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Light Red-tailed Hawk

Yesterday we found this juvenile Red-tailed Hawk perched on one of the darker Farmington Canyon Complex rocks on Antelope Island. I thought the generally light coloration of this bird to be slightly unusual but I’m certainly no expert on the color phases and morphs of this highly variable species.

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Willet Take-off

Yesterday morning I found this Willet perched on one of the Tintic Quartzite boulders so common on the northern part of Antelope Island. The Willets are still active on the higher slopes of the island but it won’t be long until they’re spending most of their time along the shoreline and causeway.

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An Outrageous Example Of Copyright Infringement Of My Images

Copyright infringement and image theft are often the bane of my photographic existence. They are illegal, unethical and rampant, ranging from abuses on Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr to theft by bloggers and others with personal websites. I spend more time filing DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown notices than I care to think about. But recently I came across an unusually flagrant example regarding one (actually two) of my photographs that really got my dander up.  The draft version of this blog post was much more extensive, documented and vitriolic than this one but writing the draft may have been cathartic for me to some degree so I’ve been able to calm down a little, to the point that I’ll now (largely) only present the images and let the viewer see for themselves what has been done (though I will point a few things out that might otherwise be missed).   This Black-billed Magpie image is one of my favorites, to the point that I have a large print of it hanging over my fireplace.   So try to imagine my chagrin when I found this while doing a reverse image search on Google a couple of weeks ago.   The owner of this site: a), has lifted my image, b), has altered it (grossly, IMO) without my permission, c), has removed my copyright notice on the image and now claims her own copyright on the print, and d) is offering it for sale on Etsy. Here’s the link but I included the screenshot in case the Etsy offering somehow disappears as soon as this blog post…

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American Kestrel With Peeling Beak

I’ve never before posted this image because of the “imperfection” of the peeling beak tip of this male American Kestrel. Bird beaks are largely composed of the protein keratin and like our fingernails are constantly growing. This can apparently cause flaking or peeling of the beak but I don’t understand why and so far internet research hasn’t provided the answer.

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Flaming Gorge Osprey – An Experiment That Worked

We returned home Thursday after spending three wonderful days camping at Flaming Gorge in NE Utah. This is very close to the view we had on most mornings from our campsites (two of them), though this image was taken the morning before the Osprey photo, below. As you’ll see, the lighting conditions were dramatically different…

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