Sharp-shinned Hawk

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) wafts overhead. Given its tiny size, the bird is almost certainly a male. Indeed, when I spotted it far out, my first thought was American Kestrel. The utterly different shape and flight style quickly dispelled that thought, and to my pleasure the little raptor, seemingly curious about us ground-bound people, floated low over our heads affixing us with a stare that you would never want to see if you were a small songbird.

Little birds are the Sharp-shinned Hawk's bread and butter and they're adept at catching them, displaying extreme aerial prowess when doing so. Hyper-aggressive with big personalities, "sharpies" are legendary for their badgering of much larger raptors such as Red-tailed Hawks. A Sharp-shinned Hawk is like Mike Tyson, Genghis Khan, and Wayne Gretzky rolled into a feathered ball of testosterone. Males are up to a third smaller than females, and the girls aren't so big either. On occasion I've lucked into a perched male Sharp-shinned Hawk - they'll often lurk quietly on a limb near a tree trunk or some other hiding spot when hunting - and the bird looks no bigger than a Blue Jay.

This bird appeared while I was with a group of people watching a vagrant Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus) in Licking County, Ohio, not far east of Columbus. The flycatcher - one of relatively few Ohio records - was a stunning adult with incredibly long tail streamers. While great looks were had, the bird never came close enough for photos. Missing the shot of the rarity is at best only a semi-bummer for me. I was watching birds hardcore LONG before I began photographing them and must confess that sometimes I still get so entranced by watching them I forget to take the photo! And at this site, a constant stream of Blue Jays passed back and forth overhead, carrying acorns on the return trip. I managed some pretty nice images of the feathered mast-toters and will make a post about that eventually. As I was all set up for birds-in-flight photography, when the Sharp-shinned Hawk decided to float over, it was an easy matter to capture him on pixels.

PHOTO NOTE: I shot this image with my workhorse Canon 800mm f/5.6 atop a Wemberly head on a Gitzo tripod. The body was Canon's remarkable R5 mirrorless camera. I've got that camera set up so that all three back buttons serve as focus buttons: rightmost is a single point, center button is all points on the central (of three) zone, and the leftmost button is all points active. When it's a lone bird in the sky, the camera instantly grabs and holds the subject, often pasting the active focus point or points right on the bird's face. It almost feels like cheating. Settings were f/9, 1/4000, ISO 2500 and +0.7 exposure compensation. In hindsight I would have backed off to f/8 and dropped the shutter speed to about 1/2000, which would have been plenty fast enough given the hawk's languid flight. This would have dropped the ISO significantly, but the R5 handles higher ISO's well and as the bird was close enough that huge cropping was unnecessary, the image is easy to work with and still looks good. Sometimes, in the heat of an exciting moment, I forget to keep tabs on those settings!