Owls, Hawks and Canons

Well the scaffolding is down and Marie Winn tells me the two hawks were spotted on the new nest thingie. Thank goodness that is over. Or is it? Today as I walked around the park with my big lens five people asked "Are you looking for the hawks?" "No," I calmly explained to the fifth person to ask me that question, "there are over 150 other species of birds in the park and I photograph them all." They seem disappointed, as if incapable of being interested in any bird the media has no interest in. I can't wait to see Pale Male and Lola on Oprah. Anyone interested in reading about the removal of the nest from 927 Fifth and its subsequent return can view a sampling of media coverage on this page on my Web site.

Speaking of celebrity birds, the Boreal Owl was back in the Norway Spruce where it spent most of last week. That bird is getting a lot of buzz among the birders. Why not shift some media attention to the owl? I propose "Boreal Bob" if it's a boy owl and "Boreal Betty" if it's a female. Maybe that will get the media interested in them and take their minds of Pale Male for a while. Although, true to form, the Daily News did write about the bird and described it as a "Boyle" owl. Only in New York kids...

The bolt holding my Wimberley tripod head to the flat plate on my Gitzo tripod sheared off and dumped my Canon 600mm f/4 lens to the ground along with the camera. Both were trashed and made inoperable. I shipped them off to Canon today but I think it's going to be expensive and I don't know where I'm going to come up with that kind of money so you probably won't see many new photos on this site for a while.

I lay the blame on Gitzo. The brass 3/8" bolt the sticks up through their flat plate that comes with the 1343 tripod legs just snapped. That shouldn't have happened. I had just switched to the flat plate because the Gitzo leveling base I had been using was acting up.

Canon will have the lens and camera tomorrow but this is their busiest time (bowl games and the Super Bowl) so I don't expect to see an estimate for at least a week. I still have my 10D and 400mm f/5.6 but I can really only use that lens when it's sunny out and the 10D won't autofocus at an aperture large than 5.6 so my 1.4x converter is out unless I want to manually focus.

I did manage to get some nice shots of a lone Cedar Waxwing feeding on some Hawthorn berries in early morning sunlight.

It was pretty cold today. The wind chill made it 6 above zero at 7:00am. The sun warmed it up a bit (probably into the mid-20's) but by 2pm there was heavy cloud cover. I am glad I got out today because I think it's going to be the last sunny day for a while.