Our family of red-tailed hawks has once again returned to their nest in the top of one of our neighbor’s trees. I had seen activity on the nest, but assumed the large birds I was seeing to be the parents. When I looked through binoculars today, I saw that these were in fact the chicks, who had gotten large enough to stand on the edge of the nest.
I grabbed camera and telescope and started shooting. The conditions were atrocious. The scene was backlit; the tree was swaying in the wind. I was shooting with an effective 3000mm lens at 200 ISO (foolish me) in full manual mode at 1/50 of a second. It’s pure luck that any images came out. Even so, I think any result would have been OK from 100 yards out.
As I was taking pictures, the chopper from WYFF News 4 started circling our house. That’s never a good sign. Turns out that they were doing a story on the demolition of the houses that began yesterday.
