dinner; white tailed kite

dinner, originally uploaded by Steve Loos.

I live in San Benito County on California’s central coast. Located along the Pacific Flyway reaching from Alaska to South America our area sees an incredible array of bird life each season. This fellow however is a year round native; a male White-Tailed Kite. These falcon-like birds were nearly extinct in California due to egg hunting, but are now well established in some areas.

These birds are common residents along grassy hillsides, and are easy to spot as they often “kite” or flutter their large white wings in a hovering motion, waiting to pounce on prey. I had not seen too many near my home, but this year this pair has setup housekeeping at the very top of a an old pine in my backyard. In addition to the regular crows, mockingbirds, doves, red tail hawks, finch, hummingbirds (little green guys - don't know the name,) and western woodpecker, these trees are home to migrating ring neck pigeons and now a pair of kites.

I only noticed them the other day, and this evening the setting sun was mixed with clouds and rain, throwing a soft warm light across the sky. Mom was in the nest, and in between harassing the local crows dad was out hunting. I noticed dad on his way back with one leg tucked up under his body and assumed he had a meal; turns out it was a nice fat mouse or gopher; he even had a few blades of grass included.

I used a D300 and 300mm f2.8 lense, bumped the ISO up a bit to keep shutter speeds fast, and set aperture priority at f5~f5.6; this gave me a decent depth of field and 1/1000sec+ shutter speeds. The D300 has a nice feature; center weight focus with object tracking. As long as I put the focus point on the subject before half-depressing the shutter, the camera will track that subject all around the frame and maintain focus. This is a great feature when trying to track birds or airplanes against a featureless sky; if focus is lost the lense will wander well out of focus and recovery to focus takes far too long.