For the Birds

Today I went to the park in the hour I had between leaving work and picking Tyler up from school. Unfortunately I didn't get many decent pictures. I saw an eagle, but I couldn't get very close. Several of us were admiring him from afar (with binoculars and zoom lenses) when some guy with a cell phone tromped over to his tree to get a cell phone picture and scared him away. That was annoying.



Mature cooper's hawk

The mature cooper's hawk landed in our neighbor's tree tonight. I took this from way inside the house looking through the transom window, so it is really bad, but I wanted to show the immature and mature cooper's hawks next to each other. I think the change is kind of neat. You can't see it in this picture, but the mature one has red eyes. His back turns more gray, too. They keep their immature plummage for a year, so it's possible this mature hawk is the immature one I photographed last winter.

Immature cooper's hawk