By now readers must know how much I like this particular takeoff posture in raptors. For me images like this are full of tension and energy and my mind’s eye wanders as I try to imagine the details of what happened next.
I’ve photographed a lot of Red-tailed Hawks recently and the streak continued yesterday morning near the north end of Utah’s Promontory Mountains.
It’s hard enough to get a single sharp shot of a landing raptor but nine days ago I captured an entire series of them near Montana’s Centennial Valley.
Some Red-tailed Hawks become quite tolerant of human activities but for me this one stood out.
Part of the reason I like the photo is because we don’t see many shots of landing raptors.
Occasionally I have second (or even third or fourth) thoughts about an image. This is one of them.
Think about it.
In a very high percentage of raptor flight shots the bird has either just taken off or it’s high in the sky and the viewer is looking up at its belly.
Chances of photographic success with this hawk when it took off were low but I aimed my lens in its direction anyway.
In my flight shots the bird is typically large in the frame but there’s often a tradeoff with that type of photo.
Sometimes a snake isn’t as dead as it seems to be (and that can scare the dickens out of a predator).
Red-tailed Hawks are known to prey on snakes but it’s something I’ve not seen often and I’d never documented it well.
