Sharp-shinned Hawk after making a kill
A short glimpse outside the window this late afternoon told me that a raptor was around because all the birds were gone. Well, wait a minute, except for one! It was our Sharp-shinned Hawk who got a hold of a woodpecker. There wasn’t much left of the bird and I’m still not 100% sure if the hawk caught a Downy or one of the larger Hairy Woodpeckers. The size of some feathers make me believe it was the latter.
I grabbed the camera quickly and opened the window silently. The picture is cropped to about DX size because I had to shoot through the legs of a bird bath installation in the front yard. The Sharp-shinned Hawk ate pretty fast but lifted its head from time to time.
The key for a sharp shot was predicting when the head is up and at a total standstill, called “peak of action”. The ability to shoot up to 14 frames per second with the Nikon Z6II helps to nail this moment even with just a short shutter burst.
Of course, we like all birds we are fortuned to see here above the Little Maquoketa Valley. It’s sad to see a woodpecker go, but we also know birds of prey, as the Sharp-shinned Hawk, play an important ecological role in maintaining the environmental health of their natural habitat. As apex predators they remove sick, old, and weak animals from prey population and keep prey species and mesopredator populations under control.