September 20th and 21st my wife and I ventured to El Rio Preserve in Marana* to see which of our avian friends were there to welcome the first day of fall**.  We started as early as possible, making it to pond-side by 6 am on the 21st (not so early on the 20th).  There was an abundance of insects, especially Dragonflies. So many in fact, that they made it to the top of the morning menu. Here are three species shifting their diets ever so slightly in the dragonfly direction that morning.

* Here is a link to a prior post on El Rio: El Rio Preserve: Fall 2024
** September 22nd at about 11am in Tucson.

American Kestrels* are raptors, North America's smallest falcons, about the size of Mourning Doves. They commonly perch on high branches or telephone wires, diving to the ground after rodents, or grabbing insects in the air. They favor open areas with short ground vegetation and sparse trees, including meadows, grasslands, farm fields and parks. They are regulars at El Rio Preserve.

The female kestrel above was perched on a high snag over the lake, just north of the main viewing deck near the parking lot. After I captured this image she took off to the east, to my right as I was standing, and disappeared into the wetlands. As she flew back to her perch I was able to get her in my viewfinder and shoot ~16 frames before she landed.

Below, she is in mid-air on her return flight.

* For more posts on American Kestrels see: New Year's Day 2018 at Fort Lowell Park.

​

Female Kestrels are rusty overall with black barring on the wings.  Males have slate blue wings with a more pronounced blue crown. In this image we can see that she is carrying something in her talons. 

In the image below the wings are up and we can see she has probably two dragonflies in her talons. Her rusty tail is in good light.

Below, we see more detail of her prey, including what looks like a blue body. She appears to be carrying her prey with one talon, leaving the other free for a safe landing. 

Below, the kestrel has landed! 

American Kestrels are raptors with sharp, hooked bills. She will likely eat the whole dragonfly starting with the head. 

To see a kestrel lunching on a songbird at Ft. Lowell Park, go to the post Lunch time in Ft. Lowell Park. Caution: This post show a kestrel eating what is probably a Lark Sparrow piece by piece including the feet!

She pauses between bites for a photo-op!

Black-necked Stilts are stately shorebirds with year round populations in North and South America, as well as breeding grounds in the western U.S. They are short to long distance migrants, and Tucson is in their migration range. For more on Black-necked Stilts, and to see them in flight at Canoa Ranch, see my prior post: Historic Canoa Ranch April 2022.

As wading shorebirds, Black-necked Stilts eat aquatic invertebrates, small crustaceans, amphibians, snails, and tiny fish. They also prey on larval mosquitoes, soldier flies, brine flies, caddisflies, dragonflies, mayflies, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles (including weevils), water-boatmen, crayfish, brine shrimp, tadpoles, and very small frogs and fish. (Ref: All About Birds). 

Here we see a Black-necked Stilt working on a dragonfly, paring it down to size for the "big gulp."   

Images above and below, lifting the prey from the water in the process of meal prep! 

I have probably caught this stilt somewhere in the process of disassembling his breakfast. Above and below, the dragon fly still has sizable wings.

Below, this dragonfly had four wings when still flying, now apparently down to two. 

Above and below the stilt whips the dragonfly back and forth . . .

Male and female Black-necked Stilts look alike, but I will assume this is a female. After a few shakes of the dragon fly she dunks it back in water and continues her food preparation. 

In this case playing with your food is not only okay, but an important part of the meal.

We see a bit more of the dragonfly itself in these frames. The wings don't come off easily!

Above, she drops the dragon fly.  She picked it up again (not shown), and repeats the whole process. The second round took about a minute and occupied ~35 frames, none of which are shown here (mercifully!) 

Below, after the second round she is finished pounding her prey and considers actually eating!

Below, our subject has taken the dragon fly into her mouth and turns 180 degrees. There is subtle bulge in the neck

Below, she takes a big gulp. We can see just a bit of dragon fly wing sticking just above the bill . . . 

seen more clearly on the cropped image below! 

Bird species that live on the water eat a wide variety of food, including some large prey.  As an example, below is a link to a prior post:

Vermilion Flycatchers are year round residents of SE Arizona, and one of the most colorful flycatchers to watch. They are "sit and wait" predators, sitting on a perch, flying out for prey, then returning. Most of their diet consists of small flying insects. However, research (Ref: Birds of the World) has shown that they will capture grasshoppers and butterflies, which they bring back to their perch and beat before eating. There is no mention specifically of dragonflies. My guess is that this immature vermilion will take his catch to a larger perch nearby and eat  at least portions of it in pieces. Or, maybe he will just drop it! 

That's all for now! 
More coming soon.

​Happy trails!

Rufous Hummingbirds are feisty long distance migrants who make a regular stop on Mt. Lemmon in the summer and fall. Every spring they fly from their wintering grounds in southern Mexico or the gulf coast all the way north to the Pacific Northwest (2700 miles one way),  or western Canada and Alaska (up to 4,000 miles) for breeding, then back again! We see them on their way south.

The image above was captured in Summerhaven on August 23, 2025. We see three females or immature males creating a bit of a ruckus at a nectar feeder. Every summer the males are the first to migrate south, arriving in Summerhaven in early July, followed by females and immature males. By early September the gang has moved south into Mexico. 

Below, a picture of a male Rufous captured on March 16, 2018 at Battiste Bed, Breakfast and Birds in Hereford, Arizona.  Tony and Julie Battiste run a fantastic B&B with a large backyard feeding/viewing area, including a photo blind. This Rufous male was on his way north to breed, and stopped to get breakfast at their feeders. 

Male Rufous are orange on the back and belly, with with a mix of white on the throat and a vivid iridescent-red gorget that varies in color and intensity depending on the angle of the light.

The photographs above and below show the variation in color of the gorget depending on the angle to the sun and in this case, my speedlite. In the absence of good light the gorget looks dark brown. 

For more on feather color and the physics of structural color in Hummingbirds, see David Allen Sibley, What It's Like To Be a Bird, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020, p 77.

Below, a male Rufous in flight on Mt. Lemmon July 19, 2024.  

Below, almost one year later to the day, a male Rufous in Summerhaven, one of the first to stop by on the long trek to Mexico. 

In the image below, a male Rufous later in the summer, August 31st, showing the rufous/orange back and edges of the gorget visible as he turns his head to the left.

Below, a female or immature male Rufous on August 23rd.  The female has a green back and a speckled gorget, often with a small spot in the middle. Immature males have a similar appearance, with the small spot over time turning into the mature male gorget.

Below, a female in flight, July 22, 2023. The back is a speckled green. 

Rufous Hummingbirds are very aggressive at feeders, both with other species and with their own. Below we see what appears to be three females/immature males facing off near a feeder, with two other birds perched on the tray. This is a wider angle view of the image that leads this post. 

​One Rufous, often a male, may work to dominate several adjacent feeders at the same time, claiming them as "his" and shooing off other hummers. The only species I have seen that ignores the Rufous is the Rivoli's Hummingbird, one of the largest hummers in North America, and clearly bigger than a Rufous. ​

Above and below, competition between Rufous over the feeder.  

You need a lot of calories to fly ~5,000 to 6,000 miles a year. Staking out and defending food sources along the way is essential. 

Below, two females in close combat. The bird on the left has closed her right eye to protect it from the incoming bill, while her bill is clearly into the feathers on her opponent's gorget. 

For the photo-geeks: As promised in the intro, here is more on the use of fill-flash for hummingbird photography using high-speed sync, or HSS. If you are not a photo-nut, don't leave now, the images that follow show more fun hummer aerobatics! 

Back in the day of  mechanical shutters, one could not use flash, even with high tech strobes, with shutter speeds over ~1/250 second. If you could, the shutter would not synchronize with the flash burst, resulting in only portions of the frame being illuminated. This restriction made the use of fill flash, putting in just enough light to "fill in"  darker portions of the photo, difficult for fast moving objects. I have used fill flash for hummingbirds at shutter speeds of 1/200 second, and if the bird was hovering in a stable position, I could get the eye and bill sharp, with blurring of the wings, which can look really cool. However, if the bird was darting here and there, which is often the case, everything gets blurred. 

I recently discovered that high speed sync was introduced in 1995, but it has taken me 30 years to discover it. (Only the newest, hottest stuff on this blog!)  Oh well . . .

In all fairness, it took the advent of  electronic shutters ~ 7 years ago, to make HSS more practical. And for action photography, it took stacked sensors and rapid readout to minimize rolling shutter on electronic shutters, necessary for high speed subjects like race cars and hummingbirds.  So, the manufacturers are now able to pair their speedlites (strobes) with their cameras to create a burst of rapid flashes that allows the photographer to use higher shutter speeds with flash and get even and predictable light on the subject, with minimal rolling shutter.

The image above, and the ones below, as well as a few in the preceding section, were all taken with a Canon R5 Mark II with a 580 EX II Speedlite set to HSS. 

In regard to set up, I can only speak to my Canon gear. Note that HSS is available in several other brands. 

​For a Canon R5 Mk II, first put a compatible speedlite on the camera. I have an aging 580 EX II, and it works.  Turn on the speedlite.  Turn on the camera, then go to the Red Menu (little camera icon) , second tab (2/9), and click on External Speedlite Control.  Scroll down to Flash Function settings and click on it. You will see the screen  below, left.

Select the box at the lower left (red on the screen) which takes you to the Shutter synchronization screen, above on the right. Click on the far right box, High-speed synchronization. A little High Sync icon lights up on the speedlite LCD screen (not shown). Note that the camera/speedlite combination stays in HSS mode even if both the speedlite and camera are turned off and then on again, but it loses the setting if the batteries of the speedlite are changed. If the batteries run low and you need to change them out for fresh ones, you will need to repeat the set up above.

Final steps: add a Better Beamer to the speedlite, set the speedlite in manual mode at ~1/15 power. I usually shoot at 1/2000 to 1/4000 second, hand held.  Although I usually shoot birds in manual mode with the ISO on Automatic, for HSS I got more predictable results setting the ISO at a fixed value, in most cases between 2000 and 4000. Check your exposure and adjust settings as needed.

On many of my usual hummer shots the birds are side-lit or back-lit, creating shadows that are hard to deal with.  The speedlite with the Better Beamer puts just enough light on the bird to get the colors and feather detail to "pop" and add a highlight off of the eye. 

Below, a female/immature male coming in for a landing at the feeder. I love the landing pose; feet out, wings back, tailed flared and bill open just a smidge. The flash fills in the detail on the chest and throat, and adds a highlight to the eye. In fact, the bird appears to have two highlights, perhaps one from the flash and the other from incident light.  Full disclosure: I did use the Remove tool in Lightroom to take out part of the nectar bottle in the upper right corner. 

Above and below, additional shots of the Rufous in flight competing for time at the feeder which was off frame to the right of these images.

One remaining challange: Depth of field. In the image above the Canon R5 Mk II does a good job of locking onto the eye of the lower bird in the frame, but the upper bird is just out of the range of focus. I was shooting at f/8.0, and at f/11 or higher, I might have had both birds in focus. At high f-stops the depth of field increases, but there is less light hitting the sensor, so the ISO goes up. For the most part in 2025 high ISO's can be corrected for with post-production noise reduction software such as Topaz De Noise. 

For a great video on autofocus in Canon cameras, especially the R5 Mk II, see Rudy Winston and canon autofocus explained. 

Below, likely a male on the upper left going after a female on the lower right. The flash adds color and detail, especially for feathers, like the red/orange in the male's gorget. 

Below, two females/immature males face off. We may be seeing some rolling shutter in the wings of the bird on the left. My experience so far with the Canon R5 Mk II set on electronic shutter is that there is very minimal rolling shutter. 

Below, more ruckus!  The far bird is in focus.

Below, the closing shot. A female Rufous strikes a pose! The right eye is in focus with a catchlight. High-speed sync flash at 1/4000th second.

Note: All images in this post processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic with noise reduction using Topaz DeNoise AI. Sharpening done as the last step.

Here is a link to hummingbird photography and HSS which I have found helpful: 
Ed Erkes Nature Photography, Different Ways to Photograph Hummingbirds, Part I

That's all for now!
Stay tuned, more coming soon! 

Happy trails!