Tag: ring necked pheasant

Barn Owl Hunting Over A Hoarfrosted Hill

The Barn Owls are still hunting sporadically during daylight in northern Utah.  I’ve seen them doing so in a variety of areas and heard reports of it happening elsewhere. Some areas near the Great Salt Lake are literally “magical wonderlands” in the early mornings due to the thick layer of hoarfrost that covers nearly everything.  The frost falls off the vegetation during the day, then reforms during the night.  The hoarfrost produces a setting for my images that appeals to me. The camera settings for the images in this post were: 1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4.  The owl was not baited, set up or called in.    Yesterday morning this owl was hunting along the upper edge of a steep-sided hill as it came in my general direction and then rounded the hill to my right.  In the first four shots you can see that its attention is riveted to the side of the hill where the snow cover is much less deep than it is everywhere else, which would increase the chances of spotting a vole. I chose to compose these images a little differently so that the frost-covered hunting ground becomes almost as important to the image as the bird.  If you have any thoughts on this composition I’d be interested in hearing them.     As the bird rounded the hilltop and got closer to me the frosted vegetation became more dominant in the images.     You can see that the snow on the hillside is patchy (most of the white is frost) so I believe that…

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Ring-necked Pheasants Struggling In Deep Snow

Native to Asia, the Ring-necked Pheasant is one of the most successful introduced bird species in North America.  They are exceptionally prized by hunters and may be the most studied game bird in the world. In Utah, as in much of their adopted range, their numbers are declining due to modern farming technologies and practices which are responsible for degradation of their preferred habitat (small farms with diversified crops and many patches of idle habitat). Collisions with vehicles are a major cause of pheasant mortality.  In a Nebraska study, 7,195 (known) pheasants were killed by vehicles in a 439 mile section of Interstate 80 in 7 years.  (I once hit a beautiful male pheasant while driving a very large U-haul truck at 65 mph.  It glanced off the windshield, which definitely got my attention, then wedged in the side-mirror, which it broke.  I  expected to be charged for the mirror but the U-haul folks were fly fishermen and were so delighted to get the tail feathers for tying flies that they let me off with no charge). During winters with heavy snowfall and severe cold these birds require dense winter cover such as cattails in wetlands, which is part of the reason they do well at Farmington Bay WMA where these photos were taken recently. Because of the snow and bright sunshine my camera techs were all over the map and pretty meaningless so I’m not including them this time.   These heavy-bodied birds are somewhat reluctant to fly so deep powdery snow presents some problems for them.  Typically they push their bodies through…

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Birds Dealing With Snow And Cold

Birds use a variety of tactics to deal with the harsh conditions presented by an unusually cold and snowy winter.  Some are more effective than others.  I thought it might be interesting to see a few of them that I’ve been able to photograph in the last several weeks. My usual disclaimer for posts relating to behaviors; many of these images are technically lacking but I think they do illustrate some of the conditions these birds are having to cope with.    1/2500, f/6.3, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light After a fresh snow, the food source for many small birds is largely hidden and unavailable without some extraordinary measures.  This juvenile White-crowned Sparrow, and others in the flock, were flitting from one snow-covered perch to another in an obvious attempt at knocking the snow off so they could get to the seeds underneath.  Here you can see the snow falling away and immediately afterward the sparrow fed on the uncovered seeds.      1/2500, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in When it gets very cold most water sources freeze up completely which makes fish largely inacessable to Bald Eagles so many of them turn to scavenging as their primary food source.  But this species adapted very well  to scavenging eons ago which is one of the reasons Ben Franklin looked in disfavor at the proposal to make the Bald Eagle our national bird.      1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or…

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It’s Been A Tough Winter For Birds (and it’s getting worse)

Typical winters are hard on birds in northern Utah (and elsewhere).  But when the season is unusually frigid with lots of snow as we’re having this year they struggle even more to survive. All of  these images have been taken since January 2 of this year.   Upland game birds like this Chukar seem to have adapted to extreme conditions fairly well.  This bird was all puffed up and sitting high on a rock to catch the earliest warming rays of the sun as it rose over the nearby Wasatch Mountains.     Another upland game species that can apparently take harsh conditions quite well is the Ring-necked Pheasant (this is a female).  They seem to forage for seeds at the base of plants where the snow isn’t as thick and their food is more readily available.     But many other species have a difficult time and quite a few birds don’t survive until spring.  The waterfowl that winter over here congregate in the few areas of open water where the flowing water is the last to freeze over.  But when it gets very cold, even those small bits of open water freeze.  I’ve seen  ducks and coots frozen into the ice, some of them still alive.  This female Green-winged Teal has just left one of the last unfrozen patches of water and is approaching an area of frost flowers.     This Northern Flicker is using the protection of the underside of the eaves of a building on Antelope Island State Park.   I thought the angled…

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The Regal Ring-necked Pheasant

The Ring-necked Pheasant is a species I’ve always enjoyed (something I can’t say about many other introduced species).   The colors of the males are spectacular and their mating antics in springtime are a lot of fun to watch and to attempt to photograph.  Fighting males really go at each other.    1/640, f/9, ISO 400, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light One of the  biggest problems with photographing them is composition – that ridiculously long tail is just so difficult to fit into the frame and still get a composition that works well if you’re close enough to get nice detail.  The other issue is catching them in the clear – these birds prefer habitat that usually has lots of obstructing vegetation in front of the bird.  But when you find one of them in the open and have nice light on the bird, their colors certainly catch the eye.      1/400, f/8, ISO 400, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light  Males like to crow at the sun as it rises, which is exactly what this bird was doing.  He’s sidelit and facing slightly away from me but this angle gave me light in the eye and I like the strutting pose.      1/800, f/8, ISO 500, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light Occasionally, especially on cold mornings, these pheasants will perch in trees in order to make best use of the warming rays of the sun.  This is one of the few times I’ve photographed this species in a tree where there weren’t a lot of obstructing branches…

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Just A Shot That I Like… #18 – Fighting Ring-necked Pheasants

In this neck of the woods Ring-necked Pheasants start feeling frisky about this time of year.   Territories are being established, hormones flowing and feathers flying.  When fighting, these birds flutter up against each other breast to breast, bite each other’s wattles and sometimes make high leaps toward each other using claws, bills and spurs.  It can be quite dramatic.   Just as the sun came over the mountains I pulled into a gravel hunter’s parking lot at the refuge and noticed these two birds going at it.  I assumed they wouldn’t let me get close enough for quality photos but they were so intent on their battle that they mostly ignored me and I was able to get just close enough.    1/640, f/9, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc With the low light I was fighting for both shutter speed and depth of field and was pleasantly surprised to get both birds sharp at these settings.  I’m always very happy to get behavioral shots like this, busy background or not. Ron

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Just a Shot That I Like… #7 – Ring-necked Pheasant Roosting In Tree

Many folks think of Ring-necked Pheasants as strictly ground dwelling birds but that’s simply not the case.  These pheasants regularly roost in trees at night and the following morning they will often be active in the roost tree for up to an hour before descending to the ground for the rest of the day.    1/800, f/8, ISO 800, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc Virtually every time I’ve seen these birds in trees it’s been on very cold, sunny mornings so I’ve always had the impression that they’re sunning themselves to warm up a bit.  Usually they flush to the ground for cover before I can get close enough for quality photos but this cooperative male apparently decided that his chill was more of a threat to him than I was.  He let me shoot away from close range for quite a while even though he was perhaps 20′ up in the tree and on a very exposed branch.  Long-tailed birds like pheasants and magpies can present difficult compositional problems when cropping for presentation but I though this vertical crop worked out well with him on the diagonal perch.    Ron  

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