The second bird instalment during the week comes right before the weekend.
Today’s Friday Feathers come from Nightjar who managed to capture barn swallows. The one with the feeding is my absolute favourite. As usually, click for full size.
“Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuum!”
© Nightjar, all rights reserved
“This is so unfair, I never get first dips” © Nightjar, all rights reserved
“Was that all????????”
© Nightjar, all rights reserved
Oh, I love the second one best, full-throated song! No? Just a desperate cry for food?? Kids these days…
I love how swallows practically live on the wing -- they even feed their offspring from the air, sometimes! Really great photos. We had a colony of swallows here this year and I took about 2 million really bad photos… they are a tricky subject!
Fantastic shots.
Fabulous photos, especially the one where mama (papa?) is feeding her chick. It looks like the other chick who’s waiting is smaller. Does that mean that the one most likely to survive gets fed first?
A wonderful series.
Apart from what others said, the fact that the parent has “landing gear down” is interesting. I bit of air braking and being ready to grab a foothold if needed?
Giliell, thank you for the captions! I meant to title the files and then forgot, but yours are funnier that what I had in mind anyway. :D
rq, yeah, desperate cry all the way, and they were quite loud. :D This went on for a while in front of my house and even when I had to come inside to start cooking lunch, I could still hear when a parent was approaching.
kestrel, thank you! They are indeed tricky subjects, this was the first time ever I managed to photograph them and I was really lucky. It was such a great opportunity, all I had to do was set the camera to continuous shooting, point at the chicks, and press the shutter button as soon as they began making noise. The result was hundreds of photos and a few good series like this one. I may submit a few more of these in the future.
Charly, thank you!
voyager, your comment made me curious, I went and looked at the other feeding shots with this pair of chicks (there were two more on the wire) and all the photos have the same one being fed. I don’t know if it’s representative, I wasn’t always pointing at these two and I missed a few feeding events. But I have 5 photos of the chick on the right being fed, 0 of the other one. Interesting observation. And thank you!
Ice Swimmer, thanks, and that’s an interesting observation as well! That happens in the other photos too, they have their legs down when approaching the chicks, but very rarely did any of the parents actually land on the wire.
What a sequence, well done Nightjar, they are great.
Thank you, jazzlet! It was quite the reward for me, I haven’t been able to go out with the big lens for a number of reasons and this gave me an opportunity to put it to use without leaving the house. I shot them from the balcony.