Don’t forget to send in your good wildlife photos; there’s always a need for more!
Reader Don McCrady sent a terrific series of eagle-in-action pictures, and topped it off with a star photo. His notes are indented:
I purchased a new Canon 6D camera a little while ago so I stuck my 400mm lens on it and went down to a local park on the edge of Lake Sammamish in Redmond, Washington. I was hoping to find some red-tailed hawks, but when I got there the sky was devoid of any birds. I was about to give up when this lone Bald Eagle started circling overhead. I was hardly ready with the camera when she spotted a fish down below and started to dive.
I followed her as best I could during her descent and glide.
She then extended her talons and splashed in for the catch.
After floating for half a minute or so, she launched herself triumphantly out of the water with her catch.
She flew almost directly over my head toward a nearby tree.
She let me approach close enough to her tree to take this shot.
After a short while, she took off again and flew away with her prize, presumably to her nest.
For the astrophoto lagniappe, my first after a long dreary winter of endless rain and clouds, I offer a simple but spectacular globular cluster known unpoetically as M92, which lies about 26000 light years away in the constellation Hercules. By the way, as nice as globular clusters can be in an astrophoto like this, they are one of the few deep-space objects that in my opinion look better through an eyepiece than through a camera.
The image was taken with an STL-4020M attached to a Stellarvue SVS130 telescope, with a total exposure time of 3 hours, one hour each for red, green, and blue. The final image was upsampled 2x.
Whoa, Mr McCrady ! Darling action sequence !
Blue
Well done!
Very nice! It takes some real skill to be able to keep a moving subject like that in the frame looking through a 400 mm lens.
+1!
Excellent! ‘Amazing’ bird – lovely plumage… remarkable that it can go from in the water to airborne – I had always assumed they only got their feet wet.
That’s some great eagle action drama! For someone who was “hardly ready with the camera”, these are damn fine pictures.
Something that I noticed (I can be slow sometimes) when I took some pics of a dust-up between a bald eagle and a osprey a while back, and which this series of pics demonstrates, is that most birds of prey seem to keep their legs raised behind them while in flight in a streamlined position and only lower them to land or strike. As the bald eagle shows here. But osprey don’t seem to do that. They often, very commonly it seems, fly around with their landing gear down.
We have ospreys nesting about 300m from our home. I will keep my eyes peeled for this behavior!
I’m definitely curious to know if this is common for osprey.
Not sure why. It might have to do with attaining a weight distribution so they can fly level with minimal effort. Perhaps ospreys vs eagles differ in their weight distribution.
Well done! Nice shots of eagle and of cluster!
Wow-that was really exciting post-
The Eagle tells story. Nice.
Very good! I see you definitely knew how to use your camera right out of the box.
Wow great photos .
Wow! Nice sequence. And nice star cluster, those space photos are a lot of work.
Fantastic series of pics!
Awesome photo-story. I’s also nice when I know exactly where the photos were taken. I live in Snohomish, but have some friends who live walking distance from lake Sammamish.
These were taken from Idylwood Park.
Great photos. I imagine you’ll take the new set up to the Skagit River eagle preserve this winter? And then, back for the tulips in Spring?
Top action shots.. great star cluster, thanks.