New Hampshire Audubon runs a raptor observatory on Pack Monadnock (in Miller State Park) during migration season (September and October) each year. I visited here a couple of years ago with my friend Dana on a pretty slow day. Yesterday afternoon, Joan and I spent a few hours there on a fairly busy day. I don’t know what the exact final official total was but is was somewhere around 130 raptors, including three adult bald eagles. (We were fortunate enough to see one of them.)
Photographing birds in flight (even relatively large birds) is really tough! Locating a bird in the viewfinder at high magnification and then keeping them in focus requires much skill and therefore much practice; something I definitely need more of!
The summit of Pack Monadanock is a good place to photograph these birds in flight as you can often get them as almost eye level which, in my view, makes for much better photographs than the typical “looking up at the birds belly” flying bird photo.
I missed one of the best opportunities of the afternoon, a relatively close in bird which caught a dragonfly in midair and proceeded to eat it according to the comments from the others watching. I missed it all with both binoculars and camera. Oh well… maybe next time!
All of these photos represent fairly heavy crops (less than half a frame) and so will not make great prints. The red-tailed hawk in the second photo is probably not a migrant. It spent a fairly long time (10-15 minutes maybe) out in front of us. It often hovered in one place and looking down as shown here; clearly hunting behavior.
[nggallery id=93]