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| Red-Shouldered Hawk, San Francisco Botanical Garden |
I almost let the smog keep me indoors today, but then I figured "no one lives forever," and I might as well get out there. At least there's no wildfire smoke.
Things have cooled down quite a bit in the botanical garden. Not much in bloom, not many birds around, and even the spiders have packed up their snares. There weren't many people either, although I did run into a guy proposing to his girlfriend at the Moon Viewing Garden. The guy had a couple of friends and a photographer staked out nearby, and when she said yes, they all came out in surprise.
A large ginkgo was putting on a great show of golden fall color, so I made my way over there, and the first people I saw happened to be my landlords, Russell and Melissa, and Melissa whipped out her phone to show me photos, taken a few days ago, of two red-tailed hawks in the same bird bath I saw one in. All of us are more than 20 years older than when my wife and I moved in. I still remember back when we were looking the place over, Russell said people tended to live here for a very short time or a very long time. Guess which one we turned out to be. I can still hardly believe I've been in one place so long.
On my way out of the garden I spotted a pair of coots feeding on land, so I went over there and photographed their feet so I could update an old post regarding the "coot-foot tree."
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| There were quite a few of these large Agaricus mushrooms busting out of the wood chips. |
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| Today was red-shouldered hawk day. |
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| I was surprised that a 1/1000th sec. exposure was still a tad too slow. |
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| I followed the hawk to where it landed, only to see a second hawk nearby. I decided to give the first one a break and focus on this one. |
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| Unfortunately, it chose to flee in the wrong direction. |
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| Meanwhile, the other hawk had flown into a nearby eucalyptus tree. |
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| It faced one way, switched to face the other way, then switched again. I wanted to get a shot of him taking off, but my arms kept getting tired, although I was able to hold the little FZ-80 for long stretches at a time. |
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| It looked like I was going to get a take-off, but this one turned out to be a false alarm. The hawk didn't leave the branch. |
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| When it finally did take off, I happened to be giving my arms a rest, but the hawk flew into another nearby tree. When I got over there I could see that it had caught a mouse. Mice are speedy, furtive little creatures, so it's kind of amazing that the hawk was able to fly down from a fair distance away and still manage to catch one unawares. |
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| Another wrong-way take-off.... |
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