Last Sunday I was sat in the garden just enjoying the sunshine & hoping to take a few pics of the contrailing aircraft flying overhead, then I had an uneasy feeling that I was being watched, I looked up & saw this beauty, I reckon it was either going to peck my eyes out......or crap on me, luckily it did neither.

That's a cool pic, looks like a falcon of one variety or another

These are not as nice as yours, but do tell a story from last Saturday/Sunday.


We scared up a Red Tailed Hawk in the park near our home.


He came flying back a few minutes later carrying something.


It doesn't look like an animal.


He worked his way around us through the forest perhaps 100 yards at a time.
Definitely not an animal, but he couldn't carry it too far at one time.


He dropped it in this nest, and then flew off before I could get a shot.


Wait, there's momma in the nest (looking out at us from the right side).


Evidently it was just a strip of bark (this is a piece that we found in the area that he must have dropped when we first scared him into flight).


We saw this the next day and identified it as the remains of a Yellow Shafted Northern Flicker.

E-PL2 with M.Zuiko 40-150mm at 150mm

Wonderful pic. There's a resident kestrel where I walk my dog, and I see her most days. Total mastery of the air.

That's a pretty sweet shot.
The kestrels around here don't come anywhere near that close. I've seen them occasionally circling off in the distance, as well as the odd buzzard from the farms outside the M25, but never quite that close. Best I got was this fella during the nice weather last week:


MajorMagee, nice sequence. Graceful but pretty ruthless!

that is a great shot

Wonderful shots.


Wheels

No kestrels around here, but we do have some resident Mexican eagles which are pretty interesting. Not really eagles, more akin to falcons and usually see them scavenging along with the buzzards. Since the buzzards are bigger, the buzzards usually win any disagreements.



A couple of months ago I shot this near Caddo lake. Best I could do with a 18-250 lens, wishing I had the 200-500 that day. This tree was at least 100 feet tall and the nest is huge. Last couple of times we went up there, I had the 200-500 with me but no one was home.