fascinatedSo I have about 16 pictures of a young bird of prey catching and eating lunch... including three userpics, which anybody is welcome to claim and I suspect some of you might be interested in. These are really neat pictures, but there are a whole lot of them,
Some of the pictures are pretty blurred, but a few are crystal-clear. I'm still a novice at photography; I'm learning how to hold the camera steady, but it's tricky, especially when I'm using a x3 optical zoom for a x11 digital zoom and the smallest waver is magnified greatly. I need a small portable tripod or something.
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The Attack This young bird of prey has just caught a rather unfortunate pigeon. I'd have more sympathy for the pigeon if it wasn't dumb enough to fly right in front of the predator... |
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Feathers Fly Apparently, even though he (or she) is covered with them, the hungry bird of prey doesn't particularly enjoy eating feathers. |
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Frightened Spectator This squirrel is wondering if he (or she) is next... |
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Y HELO THAR This squirrel is wondering what the dude with a camera is doing. |
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Fighting The pigeon was still putting up a bit of a fight at this point... not much of one, though. |
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Lunch To Go Yes, this shot is really blurred. What you can barely see is the bird just managing to haul the pigeon out of the frame; I barely got the picture at all, so I'm not too upset about the serious motion blur. (I was moving the camera pretty fast, considering it was at x11 digital zoom, which is what most of the pictures were taken at; the optical zoom limit for the camera is x3.) |
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Mine, dammit This young bird of prey (look, he's not that much larger than the pigeon) is obviously rather proud of his kill. I wonder if it's something he hasn't done that many times before. Whatever it is, he's displaying that it's his all the way and he's not letting anbody else have it... |
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Munch munch munch Now that the pigeon has been sufficiently plucked, he's starting the meal; this was taken about two minutes after the other picture that looks nearly identical. |
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Squirrel silhouette This squirrel watches the scene warily from a high branch. |
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Squarj? Blurred shot, but not as bad as I've been known to do. (Or as bad as the seven pictures I didn't upload.) Just another squirrel... There were about nine squirrels running around in front of Busch Hall (one of the buildings on the Quad, where I was), and I suspect they're what attracted the attention of the predator. I know they're what got my attention. |
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Young Predator This is the clearest picture of the bird itself, in part because it's a purely optical zoom (x3, not x11 with digital zoom that works by using the full resolution of the camera, scaling it to the resolution of the photograph, and then sort of pretending for the remaining pixels). Too bad he's not facing the camera. |
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Close Up Similar to the previous picture, but with x11 digital zoom that apparently worked very well in this case. That bird is only slightly larger than the pigeon it had for lunch. It's obviously the same species as the much larger adult bird I got a blurred picture of at the end of last semester- can anybody identify it now? |
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Slightly blurred bird This time, I (and the bird) have moved so you can actually see the bird's face, but the shot is somewhat blurred; I'm not perfect at holding the camera steady yet, especially at x11 zoom where any jiggle really gets maximized. |
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Smile, Userpic Edition This is a digitally-enhanced, cropped, and scaled version of the picture of the graffitied concrete thing I uploaded the picture of yesterday. I'm claiming this as a userpic for myself. |
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Y HELO THAR, userpic edition A cropped and re-sized version of the Y HELO THAR squirrel earlier in this set. Anybody want him as a userpic? |
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Mine, dammit! Userpic edition The bird of prey displaying his posession of his kill made for a really good userpic, too. I've got about half a flock of birds on my Friends List who may be interested- anybody want this as a userpic? |
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Bird, userpic edition And here's the photo of the bird, digitally zoomed, resized and cropped to be a very good userpic. Again, anybody want to use this? If you want both this and the previous image as a userpic, tell me which one you want more; if someone else wants the one you called second, they get it. (It's only fair.) But whoever calls it first can have it. |
And as a note, birds are as grown as they're ever going to get when they leave the nest. A 33% or so size difference can be explained by sexual dimorphism (females are larger in raptors), and there is a smaller type of this hawk, the Sharp-Shinned.
I'd love the mantly-one for a userpic. :>
I'd honestly be surprised if that's a full-grown bird, but you know quite a lot more about the subject than I do. Perhaps it's a different species from the one I'd seen previously- the bird pictured here was under a foot tall, while the other one was at least two and a half feet tall... a nontrivial difference, to put it mildly.
Sharp shins prefer other birds as prey, while red tails generally prefer small mammals.
Coops are small. Sharpies smaller. So it's okay. You prolly saw a Redtail before, way bigger.
Awesome pics though.
I don't know much about Cooper's hawks, but I will note that peregrine falcons regularly hunt and kill birds larger than themselves, stooping at 200 mph (320 km/hr) to stun their prey on the wing.
"Stun" is probably optimistic here. That pigeon was fighting as it went down. "Stunned" might be a fair assertion fo its state after it was dragged from the concrete to the grass; it was actually still alive for a while (by its rather "ouch"-like chirps) after the hawk started plucking it...
Thanks!
A young male hawk is called a Tercel.
A young male hawk is called a Tercel.
Weird, wonder why it logged me out last time.