Happy Friday!  I had a 7:00 a.m. meeting yesterday in Maquoketa, which meant I had no time for a blog or any other routine morning things.  I was proud of the fact that I not only made the meeting I was 15 minutes EARLY!  Amazing.  So I sat in my car and caught up on emails until time for the meeting and then found out that two of the people who were suppose to be there were not coming.  So after a productive non-binding discussion I had 50 minutes before going to the office.  What to do?  🙂

It was a beautiful morning and temperatures were mild.  It was past the golden hour but still the light wasn’t too harsh, so off I went to my favorite place to see what was going on at the Duck Pond.  One area of Human Relations I have enjoyed over the last 30 years is conflict resolution.  I have developed a systemic process to help individuals, couples, and groups of people resolve conflict and find synergistic solutions to their issues.  I have in all modesty had a fair amount of success with this process and in one form or another practice it on a regular basis.  Because any where there is more than one person in an environment there is the potential and all likely hood that there will be conflict.  See the Genesis process©.

Humans do not hold a monopoly on conflict.  The animal kingdom has conflict all the time and it is not always a matter of eating or being eaten.  It is often over similar issues that humans find conflict.  Turf protection, group protection, posturing, and protection of possessions.  The images I have on the blog today are of conflict with birds.

The first image was taken at the marsh area across the highway West of the Duck Pond.  Two Canadian Geese were exploring a grassy area and the ever aggressive red-winged black bird, who are absolutely fearless, spent the better part of 15 minutes dive bombing these geese.  The geese would duck and strike at the black bird and honk but they never touched him.  The black bird on the other hand would occasionally get a beak on the head of one of the geese.

I’ve stated before on this blog that I was attacked many times when riding my bike on the back roads around Dubuque.  They would actually peck at my helmet and on more than one occasion almost cause me to lose control of the bike.

The image above seems like over kill.  Two RW-Black Birds  attack a lowly sparrow and drive him away from their territory.  Remember you can click on the image to reveal a larger rendition of the image.

As I was heading back to the office I passed the farm that has many peacocks as residence.  They were out in the new corn field and sure enough two of them were fighting each other.  They would circle around each other.  They would even walk away from one another and I would think it was over but instantly they would both turn at the same time, run towards each other and then fly up and use their feet to claw at the other.  This went on for 15 minutes.  With no apparent victor they both moved closer to the barn and the other peacocks.  Perhaps they did find a synergistic solution to their conflict.  🙂

All images shot with:  Nikon D800 | Nikon AF-S 80-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 G VR lens | ISO 400 ( 1/1200 – 1/3200 sec) @f8 ~ The only problem with shooting with the D800 is the huge file size it produces and it only bursts at 4 fps.  Hard to capture the action with that slow of a shutter speed.  However it does really capture the detail.

So it was a fun 50 minutes spent doing what I enjoy the most and I still made it to work ahead of time.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  I hope you have a great Friday.  Be careful.