A glimpse of the cold reality of nature – photographed during a light snow fall in rural NE Wisconsin. This Cooper’s Hawk swooped in to capture a red-winged blackbird. The blackbird’s only option is to resign to his humble position in the food chain.

The hawk is holding the red-winged blackbird down on the ground and, when not checking his surroundings as you see here, is plucking his victim. I believe the blackbird is still alive at this point.

This image turned out much better that I had hoped. Still, it is technically deficient.  Let me tell you how I got this shot.

There was a light snow falling as I puttered around my home. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bird pass by the window. I didn’t really see it, but something about the movement by the window registered in my brain as different. I thought it was just a large mourning dove flying down from a tree to pick up seed underneath the bird feeders.  Still, I decided to take a look.

It was in the vicinity of our bird feeders, but that was no dove. I noticed the hawk standing on the struggling blackbird.  Of course, I thought to get my camera but realized shooting through the window and screen from above, through the snow fall, wouldn’t produce a worthwhile image. I watched for a time until it noticed me at the window then it flew to the right – out of my sight.

It didn’t seem like the hawk was going far, just out of my sight…in fact, I thought, it might still be close to the house. I went to another window and could see them, but all the same obstacles still blocked a good shot. Then I got the idea to see, if by chance, it was close to a basement window. I grabbed my camera and headed to the basement. Sure enough, the drama was playing out about six feet from one of the windows.

I was careful to be quiet, grabbed a bucket to stand on, positioned my camera lens in the corner of the small, basement window and tried to be inconspicuous. I was able to snap off several shots before the hawk took note of me.  After all, it was a bit preoccupied and I was being my best stealthy self. The shot you see here, was when he finally noticed me…and in a moment he was off; flying to a distant spot in the farm field to the south of our home.

As I said, this turned out better than I had hoped for because the basement windows are not clean. They are ground level windows so they accumulate dirt and leaves and grass clippings, etc.  The basement is unfinished so we don’t spend much time down there and never really think of cleaning the windows. Aside from the dirt, these are triple-paned windows and they have a slight tint to them. Thankfully, only half the window has a screen over it, so I was able to shoot from the unscreened side, trying to find a less dirty area.

The final hurdle was the light. As I mentioned, it was snowing, so the sky was dark and dreary. I had to kick up the ISO (800) and lower my shutter speed (1/250), and try to hold my lens (set at 130mm) steady enough to get a sharp image. The raw image didn’t look so hot, but I was able to tweak it enough to create the final product you see here. If you were to enlarge it, it’s not as tack sharp as I’d like and there’s plenty of noise, but it turned out to be a shot worthy of sharing.

If you’d like to see a larger, more detailed version – which I highly encourage – click on the photo and a full-screen version will open in another browser tab.

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