Just finished off my first teaching practicum this week, so I've had a bit of time to look through some pictures I took last weekend in the sun. Though I completed my entire undergraduate degree at UVic and called Victoria my home for nearly 5 of the last 7 years, with summer work I have not yet spent a summer in Victoria. I'm not quite used to all this green. After cleaning out Fowler's mews officially before removing his anklets and letting him take the summer off to moult, I looked up and saw the light through the Garry Oak branches in my backyard. Always nice - I fetched my camera and took this shot. The white background of this blog really doesn't do it justice - it needs a dark background to offset the sky more. Oh well, it is what it is.
Later in the afternoon Mom spied some feathers floating down from the tree tops. We went out to investigate and found this adult male Cooper's Hawk plucking something up on a high branch. I'm not sure what it was, I didn't get a good look at it from the angle I had and he flew off (pursued by crows) after a few minutes. Two of the better shots I took of him below. These were taken with my 70-300mm lens, F5.6 (it should have been more like 7 to get a better depth of field) 1/250 s (that explains it, not much light for a moving animal. I suppose I could have increased the ISO but I like to keep that low.
I cropped the first one to make him look a bit more hidden as he is a bit obscured and eating, that and to remove a very blurry branch from the shot. The second I cropped out the same blurry branch but put the hawk in the top right to give him some space to look into. As he's looking at me it works a little better.
