A few weeks ago I saw a golden eagle flying over one of the Lime Ridge open spaces on my drive to work. The next week I set out to photograph it. Using my K-7 (bird photography with film is tough and wasteful) and Vivitar (Tokina) 400mm 1:6.3, I set out at lunch on Monday for my first attempt.
There were a number of birds, but no golden eagles. This was fine, I decided. I had four more days to reach my goal of photographing the golden eagle that week.
Red-tailed hawk or some kind of Merlin
The first bird I found, and the last later in the hike, I have not yet positively identified. All I can say for sure is that it's reddish and has darker-red spots on the back of its head. I'm not a bird expert, so I'm poor at identifying some of them.
The winds in Lime Ridge move quickly and gives predatory birds ample up draft for hunting. And it's always a thrill to watch these raptors dive and fly off with a field mouse.
The Vivitar 400mm, the same lens I used for the air show last year, is very difficult to focus. It back-focuses somewhat (this may be a function of my focusing screen, not the lens) and the DoF at f6.3 is thinner than a guilty man's alibi.
White-tailed Kite
As I oriented myself, I noticed a white-tailed kite hunting prey about 75 or 100 feet above me and up the trail a bit. I hiked a hill until I was slightly below the kite and took about 55 or so photos. This one turned out the best of them.
For the bird photos, I simply set my camera on auto-drive mode and held the shutter release. On my Monday trip, in one hour, I took more than 800 photos.
I followed the kit a bit, but at considerable distance. The 400mm lens functions similarly to a 600mm on my K-7 due to the crop factor; add to that the image cropping I did and the kite appears much closer than it actually was. But that's why people have super telephotos -- birding.
I decided for this image to convert it to monochrome and give it a film grain look. No reason why, except that I thought the result would look good.
Lime Ridge Bike Path
As I continued my hike, from the top of the hill I decided to take some scenery shots. No birds were out and I was beginning to feel my hunt for a golden eagle would be a fool's errand.
'What if you catch your foot in a hole and damage the tendon? What if you fall and hurt that foot and break your camera? What if you get too tired to walk back to your car, or simply can't?' I punished myself with self-doubt and looked extensively at the three paths down the hill, judging which would be the least strenuous.
I opted for a path with a wind-gnarled oak tree. It was not the easiest, but would put me close to where a hawk was gliding, hunting for a squirrel, mouse, or vole.
The bird flew to a different hunting ground, and I decided to practice my tree photography. Last year a friend asked me for a tree portfolio with the chance of doing some tree photography. I realized, assembling the portfolio, how weak my tree photographs were. So one goal for this year was to take better -- and hopefully one good -- tree photograph.
I like Lime Ridge for this because the trees exude character. They seem to almost come alive out of the landscape. In singlets or small, but disparate groups, they yield little or not usable shade, but instead provide a visual interest to otherwise barren and similarly shaped hills. They make the hills something other than two-dimensional cutouts in a diorama and provide depth, purpose, and interest. And some look good in monochrome, too.
I headed down the path, back to my car, having spent much of my lunch hour worrying too greatly about re-injuring my Achilles tendon or damaging the hardware which was only three months into its remainder-of-my-life service. Someday, if I am cremated, what will remain will be a pile of ashes, four metal anchor assemblies for plastic reinforcing bands, and some tiny screws. And a pile of ashes. In a perfect world, my ashes will be scattered in the bottom of a barbque pit so that I my remain can flavor steaks and burgers.
At the bottom of the hill, an Anna's Hummingbird sat on an impossibly thin, fragile, dried shrub branch. Even at only an ounce or three, however much these weigh, the dried branch bent precariously under its weight. In the wind, the branch swayed toward and away from me with each gust, more as the bird's profile caught the air.
Anna's Hummingbird
Behind me I heard mice or lizards in the grass rustle, and I saw a new bird hovering, hunting, biding is time for the now-spooked rodents to regain their courage or need for food and scurry from cover. The red-tailed hawk hovered and watched carefully at the ground. I took a few pictures, bu decided to find a better vantage point. I wanted to be directly in front of it, to see about what a mouse or vole would see when leering up from the grass, searching for a raptor and gauging the safety or looking for seeds.
Red-tailed Hawk
But before I had taken five steps, it was gone. Disappeared into a tree that quickly. And then a shadow moved across the ground in front of me. And a second. No bird I had seen yet cast a shadow. Only one bird I could think of was large enough to cast that shadow. And above me, circling, hunting, and screeching appeared two golden eagles. The sun back-lit their feathers and gave them trails of fire. They circled slowly, like lumbering jets, moving with the confident, timed pace that comes from knowing nothing higher on the food chain.
Golden Eagle
They circled together, and then opposite, and rose, as though caught in an invisible tornado, higher, even higher until my eyes could see only dots and my lens could not find feather detail.
Golden Eagle
They flew in front of the sun, invisible, circled there, descended carefully, but casually. Their heads moved around slowly, but in time they both focused on one area, one general spot, one specific target, and with the speed of a mouse trap their wings folded backward and they dove faster than I could track with my lens, faster than I could follow with my eye behind a hill and there was a scream and silence.
After some seconds they flew back up from the hill and off. They were too far for me to see, even with the Vivitar, what they had caught. They flew off toward they nest and, hopefully, a chick.
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