Collared Sparrowhawk & prey

[Colin Driscoll]

Made this last August, another from Boodjamulla NP far northern Australia. Around midday I went to the window of the small donga that I was staying in and saw this just 2 meters away. I carefully slid the window open enough to get the lens out- no choice of angle and I had to push the iso way up to get good dof at that distance. The sparrowhawk had just caught a Bar-shouldered Dove and was in the process of squeezing the life out of it.



50D 100-400 @ 100 1/125 f11 iso1250 natural lighting.

[Clement Francis]

Amazing picture, very natural

[Mital Patel]

beautiful image. a bit of more lower angle and more of a left side the bird would be a good frame .. nevertheless this is an awesome image.

[arash_hazeghi]

This is a great behavioral shot, technically the angle is steep and BG is too busy but the intense eye contact and the kill makes up for it. I'd try to selectively blur parts of the BG to divert attention to the bird. Nice work

[Harshad Barve]

lovely shot , lower angle could have made this winner , tight vertical compo can be tried as there is nothing attractive on right hand side
TFS

[Kiran Poonacha]

agree to more space on the left and less on the right, Loved the eye contact and the little tail of the dove creates interest to the frame, congrats..

[Paul Randall]

Well captured Colin. Love seeing the powdery grey on the back. Not seen in many shots of this species.
It actually looks more like a Brown Goshawk to me but there is no real sense of scale to get a better idea.
Very hard to tell apart from a photo. Cheers, Paul Randall.

[Colin Driscoll]

Thanks all for the comments. Paul, I agree about the Brown Goshawk similarity but it was a Sparrowhawk.

Just a couple of points: there was no other angle available, just shoot from the window or not at all; the lhs was a really messy patch of dead twigs so I guess a vertical crop would be the only other option.