Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: hawk

As long as I remember the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary's hosted an ever-changing handful of injured raptors. Most have some sort of wing damage and all are unable to live in the wild. At Kellogg they live in large cages which have been set up around one of the ponds. The current set includes several owls, a bald eagle, and two Red-Tailed Hawks. The birds are cared for by the staff, and are definitely on display. Evidently some are used as teaching aids in presentations, though I don't recall ever seeing such use. The injured birds arrive by a variety of methods. Evidently everyone half-way local who cares for injured wildlife is aware that the Sanctuary can and does have facilities to care for injured birds. Each bird's cage features a prominent sign explaining how it came to be a guest at the sanctuary, an estimate of its age, and other information. When I was a kid these broken birds fascinated me. Nowadays I'm just glad they're being cared for, and sad that they have to live in cages.

Up above our cabin....

Well on his way to becoming an old friend. Except he eats birds, and scares everyone off....

Concluding: So I switched lenses again, this time to the Nikon 80-200 mm I use all the time (I called it "my best piece of glass" a few weeks back). And captured this photo, which I think quite fine. Then I tried to sneak outside and get a picture from another angle. The bird fled.... Those ruffled feathers demonstrate why we call the area between the house and the garage "the wind tunnel." He was occasionally fighting for balance.

Continuing my story: So I retrieved the D300, which was still wearing the old Minolta 75-200 lens I've been experimenting with. This shot's decent, except for the light reflection in the window panes, but it's less sharp than I'd hoped.

I'll add some notes, and probably a couple more pictures, in a bit.

Not a good picture, but it shows the hawk's banded tail. It also shows the constraints I was working within. I was heading for the post office this afternoon to check our mail when I looked out the window and found this bird looking back at me. So I grabbed a camera--my V1, as it happens--and shot a few pix. Since the 10-30 mm lens is obviously inadequate, I promptly switched to the 30-110. The view demonstrates the only available shooting angle. Besides the limited perspective, I was shooting through a screen and a south-facing, double-paned, window that was reflecting the sun in inconvenient ways. None of the V1 photos were really satisfactory--with the 10-30 mm lens, we got this view; with the 30-110, the window screen interfered with the AF mechanism.

A Cooper's Hawk, I'm pretty sure. Sitting on our telephone pole, watching our bird feeders.