Yesterday morning a Rough-legged Hawk gave me a perspective on the alula that I had never seen (or at least noticed) previously. I was on the verge of deleting these images when at the last second something about the left wing caught my eye.
This female American Kestrel has been hanging around the same area of Farmington for almost two weeks now. Yesterday morning we found her near the end of one of her meals.
In my area most sparrow species aren’t easy to approach or catch out in the open for most of the year but when it’s very cold and they decide it’s time to begin their communal morning feeding routine they become much braver souls. Earlier this week I photographed three species of sparrows as they harvested seeds from their frost-covered parent plants.
For me the background can sometimes be almost as important as the bird. In this case it’s probably because I identify so personally with what’s back there, even though it’s all out of focus. This place is where I cut my photographic teeth years ago.
During winter, photography in the valley of the Great Salt Lake can be difficult at best due to frequent inversions that trap fog and smog in the low-lying areas and that especially includes the marshes near the lake. These inversions often last for days or even weeks and the fog and smog get progressively worse each day. But the fortunate result for photographers is the thick hoarfrost that blankets everything in the vicinity of the lake if and when the fog burns off during the day.
Although the American Coot is almost exclusively a herbivore it will occasionally make an exception and eat animal matter. They’re also well-known for food thievery (kleptoparasitism) and two days ago this Pied-billed Grebe nearly became one of its victims.
I’ve known for years that extremely cold temperatures can make many birds “stickier” – easier to get close to. Two days ago I learned that this maxim also applies to woodpeckers.
I suspect that most folks aren’t accustomed to seeing a Wilson’s Snipe in a setting like this.
I’ve only had two reasonably good chances at the dark morph of the Rough-legged Hawk and one of them was a highly unexpected encounter two weeks ago.
Two days ago this juvenile Red-tailed Hawk put on quite a show for me but for a variety of reasons I blew many of the chances I had with it.
Yesterday morning the Pied-billed Grebes at Farmington were having a bit of a feeding frenzy and I was able to capture several instances of interesting feeding behavior.
Like some other buteos, depending on conditions the Rough-legged Hawk may hunt from the air using flapping/gliding flight or from an elevated perch but their tendency to hunt in flight goes up significantly with increasing wind speed. This makes sense because hovering in the wind requires less energy than flapping flight.
As most everyone knows, the Passenger Pigeon is extinct. So is my great (x 8) grandfather Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts but I recently found a link between those two old birds and as an aficionado of both family history and birds I couldn’t be happier about it.
Eight days ago I photographed a Northern Harrier as it flew toward me at an angle and then banked away. The following day, because of time constraints and computer issues I posted only a single shot of the banking maneuver but now I wish I had posted the entire flight sequence of four images. With your indulgence for posting the same image twice I’ll do just that this morning.
