Tag: baiting

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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Baiting Coyotes On Antelope Island

I’m of the strong opinion that baiting wild animals of any kind for photographic purposes (or most any other purpose, with very few exceptions) is a despicable practice.  It often puts the critter at risk in a variety of different ways and no photo is worth that.  I’ve railed against baiting before on this blog so I won’t go into all the details once again here.  But this morning I saw another example of why I despise this practice so much. The weather has been dreary and overcast for so long that I haven’t been out photographing for a while, but this morning we decided to head for Antelope Island just to get “out there” and ease our cabin fever a little, despite the clouds.   As we came around a small curve on the island we noticed this coyote in the middle of the road.  I could hardly believe it when I saw that it was feeding on dog food that someone had obviously spread down the center of the road in an attempt to lure coyotes up close and into an area where they wouldn’t be obscured by vegetation.  And it worked!     Even as close as we were, the coyote was intent on eating all of the dog food before it left the area.  After taking a few documentary photos I drove up to the spot and then we picked up the kibbels and threw them away from the road (we probably should have taken them with us but I didn’t think of it at the time).  We then reported what we saw…

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Winter Barn Owls In Flight

Normally it’s very difficult to find Barn Owls hunting in daylight but an extremely cold winter a few years ago caused some of them around here to continue hunting into mid-morning.  They were looking for voles in the wetlands and it was fascinating to watch and photograph them as they effortlessly cruised over the phragmites and grasses, occasionally turning abruptly and diving for prey.   1/2000, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in It was very cold and frosty with lots of moisture in the air which turned the sky background a color that appeals to me.     1/2000, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in Sometimes they were low enough to get the Phragmites in the setting.  Phragmites is a scourge to wetland managers but I’ve always liked it for backgrounds. When the owls would fly west I would often get light on the entire  bird.     1/2000, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in But when they flew east they were sidelit.  I like both effects.     1/3200, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in Partly because of their deeply set eyes it’s a challenge to get catch lights in Barn Owls.  But here the bird was hovering over prey and looking down at it so because of the behavior you wouldn’t expect to get…

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Juvenile Red-tailed Hawk Honing Its Hunting Skills

For the past few weeks I’ve been working a pair of juvenile Red-tailed Hawks with varying degrees of success.  Mostly they’re just toying with me – staying just out of range or on the wrong side of the road in poor light.  But on two mornings the lighter colored of the two birds put on quite a show.  It chose to do its “sit and wait” hunting from a series of dark rocks close to the road and didn’t seem to care that I was there.  And close.    1/2000. f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, not baited The rocks are on the side of a small mountain with vole-laden prairie grass between me and the hawk so the bird would perch on them and then take off for prey it spotted – often in my general direction.  The prey is presumable nearly always voles though these young birds are usually unsuccessful.  It did catch and eat a small snake once but the action was buried in the grasses.  I’ve yet to see it actually catch a vole and that makes me feel sympathy for the hawk but on the other hand all these attempts at prey have given me some nice photo ops.       1/2000. f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, not baited Usually the setting had grass and/or rocks in the background and often it was close enough to the hawk to make focus-lock difficult but here the background was a little further away.  On both days by the time the bird cooperated the sun was high enough that the…

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Landing Red-tailed Hawk

I haven’t often succeeded in photographing a landing raptor.  When they take off they usually don’t come back and when they do it’s often difficult to maintain focus on them as they land because of close backgrounds.  However, this immature Red-tailed Hawk gave me just such an opportunity a couple of days ago.    1/2000, f 7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4 It was hunting from a huge rock outcropping and looking down over the valley in the background of this image.  I spent quite a while with this bird but it was side lit and I wasn’t very optimistic about getting a decent take-off shot because I expected it to spot potential prey in the valley below and take off away from me, giving me butt shots only.       1/1600, f 7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4 Which is exactly what happened. However, I saw where the bird landed far below in the valley, missed the prey and took off again so I wondered if I could be lucky enough for it to return to the same perch.  I wasn’t particularly optimistic because I was so close to the rock (you’ll notice from my techs that I had even removed my tc).  The problem was that as soon as the hawk took off from that distant perch it disappeared behind the same massive rock outcropping on the side of the mountain that had been its perch and if it did return I wouldn’t know it until the very last split second, as it flared up to land on the rock from behind and below it. So I prefocussed on the likely…

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Just A Shot That I Like… #17 – Short-eared Owl In Flight With A Vole In Its Beak

This is another image from my time with the Short-eared Owls at Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.  This male was kept very busy hunting voles and feeding his mate and youngsters at the nest.   Typically I would see him hunting far off, dive for a vole, and if he was successful he’d occasionally eat the vole himself but most often he would return with it to a favorite perch in the vicinity of the nest – and without exception he would always carry the vole in his talons before he got to the perch (and always his left talon, but I covered that topic in another post).     1/1600, f/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc However, just before (or just after) he took off from the perch to deliver the meal to his family he would always transfer the vole from his talons to his beak.  I have a theory as to why he did so.  The nest was on the ground at the base of a sagebrush.  Whenever the male landed at the entrance to the nest with the vole the female would rush out and very aggressively grab the vole.  And I DO mean aggressively!  If I’d been him I’d have been afraid to get that close to her with food.  So the male would approach the nest very gingerly with the vole in his beak and drop it in front of him and quickly retreat as she rushed out.  I suspect it was easier for him to avoid a confrontation with her if he could quickly drop…

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“Baiting” – A Matter of Definition and Ethics

Baiting just may be the most hotly debated topic in the bird photography community.   Part of that debate revolves around the fact that not all nature photographers agree on a precise definition for the term.   I’ve followed and participated in discussions of this “hot topic” in nature photography discussion forums for years now and it seems that the most mainstream definition, the one that the vast majority of avian photographers subscribe to, is a version of this: baiting – using food or other items or methods to artificially lure birds in close to the photograpaher.  This would include using recorded bird calls, “setups”, back yard bird feeders, stuffed raptors (many birds come in to “mob” raptors) and a variety of other ingenious methods used by some well known “nature” photographers.  One of the most controversial forms of baiting is using live bait (often pet store mice) to bring in raptors – owls in particular.  This practice can have many negative efffects on the birds – from making them dependent on an artifical food source to spreading disease to causing birds to be hit by cars – not to mention the ethical dilemma of “nature” photographers photographing birds in unnatural situations.  To bait or not to bait is an ethical decision that virtually every bird photographer must make.  For me that decision was easy – I do not bait my intended subjects.  I do sometimes photograph birds at my back yard feeder simply for the practice but I don’t post those images on online forums, include them on my website…

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Barn Owls in Flight

Flight shots of Barn Owls are very difficult to get because these birds are almost strictly nocturnal and typically fly and hunt only at night.  Photographing birds in flight in the dark or very low light is virtually impossible without using artificial lighting methods which I will not do for ethical reasons. Barn Owl in flight during in full daylight   I had never even seen a Barn Owl in flight until the winter of 2007-08.  That unusually frigid winter began early and brought more snow than usual to the valleys of Utah.  Suddenly, during January and much of February, Barn Owls were hunting the marshes close to the Great Salt Lake during daytime – sometimes until 10 or 11 AM.  Their usual strategy was to hunt for voles (very similar to mice) along the edges of Phragmites growth in the wetlands.  Typically it was very cold on those mornings – often between 0 and +20 degrees Farenheit which made it very uncomfortable standing outside in front of a tripod mounted camera for hours on end!  I very nearly lost some digits to frostbite many times but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.    Barn Owl hunting voles along frosty Phragmites edges I usually preferred to get Phragmites in the backgrounds of my flight shots if possible because they make such a nice backdrop.  In the photo above, there had been heavy fog with sub freezing temperatures so literally everything was covered with a heavy coating of frost.  A magical setting.        Barn Owl skimming Phragmites in background Sometimes the…

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