Brazen Sparrowhawk.

There is a Sparrowhawk that has been visiting our garden for a couple of years now, at least I think it is the same bird. He is very confident, sometimes just perching on fences and looking into the house at us moving around. I opened the back door of the house last week to get something from my car and he was perched on some wooden boards that surround a flower bed that is about ten feet away. I expected him to fly off immediately but he just stayed there looking at me. He was soaking wet and indeed it was still raining heavily but he didn’t seem to care so I closed the door and waited until he left in his own time. This set me thinking because we have seen him do this on a number of times since. Two days ago I decided to try my luck and photograph him because as he has got older he has become a very handsome bird and well worth getting an image of. I left the back door open about two feet so if he perched in his usual position I might be able to get a shot. I took some shots of the wood he normally perches on before he hopefully arrived, just to see what the minimum focussing distance was and where I would have to stand to get him in focus and in the frame. I decided to use my Canon 600 f4 prime which I left ready in our kitchen, sometime later Susan was making some pikelets in the kitchen when she said ‘he’s here’. I quietly positioned myself in the spot I had marked and handheld the lens to take a shot, he didn’t flinch, he just looked at me. However, I had misjudged things, I thought I could frame him as a landscape but he was too close so I had to rotate the lens and camera to portrait which is a bit more awkward when hand holding, but a lot easier if you have a battery grip on your camera because you can access the focus/shutter button without having to wrap your hand over the top of the camera. I took a few shots as he just perched there and as the light began to fade he just flew off presumably to roost, what a lovely bird he is.