Red-Shouldered Hawk and Broad-Winged Hawk
Oct. 21st, 2023 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerIt's been four weeks now since we returned from our vacation to West Virginia and North Carolina... and I'm still not done posting blogs about it. Specifically I'd like to share some pictures from our visit to the Carolina Raptor Center on our last day. In fact it was not only on the last day of our trip but in the last few hours of it. After visiting the birds we drove across town to the airport to leave!
Part of the reason I'm posting these pics four weeks later is that I didn't initially realize I had good photos from the visit. The conditions were poor. I tossed the pics into a folder on my computer and didn't look at them, assuming I'd be disappointed. Three weeks later, with a proverbial sigh and a feeling of "Well, I might as well take a look," I looked and... was surprised at how many great photos I had.
What do I mean by poor conditions? Two things. For one, dim light on a cloudy day meant I was capturing pictures at slow shutter speeds. Image stabilization on modern cameras helps with reducing blur from camera shake at slow exposures but does not help with photographing subjects that move— such as extremely agile, and sometimes twitchy, birds! Unsurprisingly many of my pics were blurry... but that's also why it's great that digital "film" is cheap. I took lots of photos to try to get at least one good one of each bird. The photo above is an example of a really good one. It's a red-shouldered hawk.
The second challenge of poor conditions was that the birds were in enclosures placed far away from where we could view them, and the enclosures all had wire mesh. It is hard to focus through wire mesh on the animals behind it. You can see the wire blurred out in the foreground of the photo above. That's because in that photo I really nailed the focus on the bird's eyes. Here's a 1:1 crop of the bird's head:
Just as this red-shoulder was hardly the only bird at the raptor center it was also far from the only bird I capture good pictures of. The next bird I struggled to identify after the fact as it looks to me like a red-tailed hawk... except the colors aren't quite right, even for that species which has a fair range of color variation. In fact it is a broad-winged hawk.
Part of my difficulty in identifying this broad-winged hawk correctly is that the species is not native to the Western US. Its range covers the Eastern US and Great Plains, on up into Canada, and down through coastal Mexico and into Central America. I've only seen broad-winged hawks with certainty once before, on a trip to Florida several years ago.
Once again, capturing sharply focused pictures of the bird through the wire mesh was difficult, but I tried dialing it in with manual focus. The immediate feedback of digital photography helps immensely here, as does the ability to capture multiple shots inexpensively. Viewing these photos at full resolution (the pic above is another 1:1 crop) was a pleasant surprise weeks after the fact.
More birds to come!
Part of the reason I'm posting these pics four weeks later is that I didn't initially realize I had good photos from the visit. The conditions were poor. I tossed the pics into a folder on my computer and didn't look at them, assuming I'd be disappointed. Three weeks later, with a proverbial sigh and a feeling of "Well, I might as well take a look," I looked and... was surprised at how many great photos I had.
What do I mean by poor conditions? Two things. For one, dim light on a cloudy day meant I was capturing pictures at slow shutter speeds. Image stabilization on modern cameras helps with reducing blur from camera shake at slow exposures but does not help with photographing subjects that move— such as extremely agile, and sometimes twitchy, birds! Unsurprisingly many of my pics were blurry... but that's also why it's great that digital "film" is cheap. I took lots of photos to try to get at least one good one of each bird. The photo above is an example of a really good one. It's a red-shouldered hawk.
The second challenge of poor conditions was that the birds were in enclosures placed far away from where we could view them, and the enclosures all had wire mesh. It is hard to focus through wire mesh on the animals behind it. You can see the wire blurred out in the foreground of the photo above. That's because in that photo I really nailed the focus on the bird's eyes. Here's a 1:1 crop of the bird's head:
Just as this red-shoulder was hardly the only bird at the raptor center it was also far from the only bird I capture good pictures of. The next bird I struggled to identify after the fact as it looks to me like a red-tailed hawk... except the colors aren't quite right, even for that species which has a fair range of color variation. In fact it is a broad-winged hawk.
Part of my difficulty in identifying this broad-winged hawk correctly is that the species is not native to the Western US. Its range covers the Eastern US and Great Plains, on up into Canada, and down through coastal Mexico and into Central America. I've only seen broad-winged hawks with certainty once before, on a trip to Florida several years ago.
Once again, capturing sharply focused pictures of the bird through the wire mesh was difficult, but I tried dialing it in with manual focus. The immediate feedback of digital photography helps immensely here, as does the ability to capture multiple shots inexpensively. Viewing these photos at full resolution (the pic above is another 1:1 crop) was a pleasant surprise weeks after the fact.
More birds to come!
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Date: 2023-10-22 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 03:17 pm (UTC)