My husband grabbed the camera, alerted me, and between us we spent an interesting quarter-hour observing the behaviour of the young bird who surveyed our back garden for opportunities of his (or her) own. Sure enough, prey was there in the form of a mourning dove trying to hide in the back northeast corner where the thickest cover of trees is.
Here is the prize photo, taken as the bird spots its prey.
Photo belongs to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be used without attribution.
13 comments:
Karen... That's a VERY nice picture of a sharpy... Good Work!
Don
Spectacular photo, kudos to your husband . I have a 10x digital and bought a 1.7 teleconverter for a 17x zoom but still can't manage to capture good bird pics. We have a sharpshinned hawk in our neighborhood but I've only managed to take a picture of it at a distance. Lots of dove kills around the neigborhood.
What a great shot! Like ki, I've only managed to catch distance shots of the hawks that visit my backyard. I like to see them, but... oh, why not a regular pigeon instead of a mourning dove?! (Yes, I am revealing my prejudices here--I love mourning doves.)
{{{{{PICTURE PERFECT!}}} great photo!
Karen, that's spectacular! We have not each day such luck, to make a photo like this!
Sigrun
Oh! If only I would have such oppurtunities! Fab picture!
That is such an awesome picture! What luck that the camera sat there with the zoom attached, ready to snap this shot. Your hubby got a wonderful shot! I hope the poor little dove survived.
I once watched a sharpy sitting outside our living room window having a pigeon for a meal.
The bird caught its prey, but flew off with it to make a meal elsewhere.
Awesome photo. Sad for the dove but that is nature. Our cats have left the remains of more than a few birds at our door. Somehow this feels so much more dramatic.
I have never seen a hawk other than in the sky. We do get a couple of green woodpeckers that spend about 15 minutes eating insects off of the lawn.
That is one superb photo, by the way.
Driggs Said;I came to this site this morning to positively identify the hawk from your beutiful photograph.
I have been watching a Sharptailed Hawk in my yard in Western Montana all winter long hunting our birdfeeder.
A moment ago for the first time I saw him hunt and kill a chikadee.
He swooped into a Juniper bush flushed dozens of birds from the juniper, the chase was on and within 30 yards caught the chikadee in midair and landed in the snow.
He returned to the same juniper to eat his catch! Thank you
At first glance a sharpshinned and a Cooper's look much alike. I suspect that the "sharpshinned" that are taking pigeons are really Cooper's hawks.
This bird's tail is square and narrowly tipped with white, as opposed to rounded with a wider band of white. That is what I used to identify it. The tail doesn't show up very clearly in this shot, but we have lots of other photos of this bird.
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