April 1, 2007

It's a snow day, I'm staying home!

As if the cruellest of April fools pranks, Sunday dawned a reasonable day. There was a skiff of snow overnight but the clouds were high and thinning.

Then it hit by noon we were socked in, the wind picked up from the North East and snow fell it buckets. It is 7:30 p.m. and it is still falling!

About 5:30 p.m., Bill wandered in to the office and spotted a hawk sitting on the property marker only 60 meters away. Gathering the cameras, he began to take a couple of pictures and then, a raven swooped in and circled the hawk's position.
Hot on the heels of the raven, was a bald eagle and in the time it took the camera to recover and the raven to do 1/4 circle, the eagle has replaced the hawk on the post. The raven alights 50 feet away and then walks right up to the base of the eagle's perch. A few minutes later; the hawk is sitting on a post to the west (off by the pond), the raven is on a post at the north end of the property and the eagle is retaining his position. All three form a triangle surrounding some prime gopher territory.

After taking a couple more pictures, Bill then got the binoculars to watch a little closer. Suddenly, he had an idea. Setting the camera to a manual 0.5m focal length and switching to close-up mode, he buried the lens in the eye-piece of the binoculars and ... la voila, close-ups of the eagle.