The San Diego Birding Festival has turned up some nice local birds over the years, around Mission Bay, in the marina or in the San Diego River channel just beyond. This year a pair of Cooper’s Hawks were building a nest in a tree right in the parking lot of the Marina Village Conference Center where the Festival is headquartered. As you might guess, this is a very photographed bird 🙂

The male was about 10 feet over and up in this same tree, busy breaking off branches and flying them back to the nest. I am not sure any of us were fast enough to catch him in the act, but it was interesting behavior. He would snap the branch off with his beak, drop it, and catch it on the wing to take it back. Very impressive! Momma had apparently come over to the harvest tree to supervise his choices, as she was not active in gathering (and therefore provided the easier target for digiscoping). Decent light, somewhat offset by an active bird and good stiff breeze moving the branches. And the bird was further away than it looked. In the top of one of those very tall Eucalyptus and several rows of cars over, so I was working at maximum zoom on the camera. The second shot is near maximum zoom on the scope as well. All in all I am happy with the results. Both images took some extra sharpening on the birds head.

Canon SD4000IS behind the 15-56x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. 1) about 3000mm equivalent field of view, 1/250 @ ISO 160, f8.5 effective. 2) about 4500mm equivalent field of view, 1/200 @ ISO 200, f13 effective. Programmed auto.

Processed in Lightroom for clarity and sharpness.

In both shots, the bokeh of the moving leaves behind the bird, the pattern on the branches, the light itself, add interest and impact to the shots.