{"id":760,"date":"2011-09-10T08:07:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T12:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=760"},"modified":"2011-09-10T09:04:49","modified_gmt":"2011-09-10T13:04:49","slug":"raptors-on-pack-monadnock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=760","title":{"rendered":"Raptors on Pack Monadnock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhaudubon.org\/\">New Hampshire Audubon<\/a> runs a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhaudubon.org\/locations\/raptor-observatories\">raptor observatory<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pack_Monadnock\">Pack Monadnock<\/a> (in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhstateparks.org\/explore\/state-parks\/miller-state-park.aspx\">Miller State Park<\/a>) 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&#8217;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.)<\/p>\n<p>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!<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;looking up at the birds belly&#8221; flying bird photo.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8230; maybe next time!<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>[nggallery id=93]<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":769,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}