Urban Eagles

Have I ever mentioned how much I love living in the West End of Vancouver? The quaint residential area of Vancouver made up of older apartment buildings that border Stanley Park. I have the windows fully open so I can absorb as much Vitamin D as possible on this cloudy day and what do my eyes spy? Large mount of crows flying around in the area. I suppose you could call it a murder of crows.

One thing I now is that when there are large groupings of crows, something is up. Typically you see large murders of crows over near Burnaby during the fall as they get ready to migrate, but here in the West End it isn’t something I have typically seen. I wondered if there was a larger bird nearby.

Then I heard it, the cry of an Eagle. I scoured the area to see if I could see what my ears could and my eyes couldn’t. I moved out on to the balcony, again I heard the cry of an Eagle.

I looked up at the source and there, in all its majestic splendor; an adult bald eagle.

Mind you this photo is a crop from the building across the street. We’re on the 8th floor, the building across from us has 14 floors.

The camera is set to AI Servo, Center Point Focus and Aperture Priority. I fire off a few shots while trying to keep my Canon EF 7-200 f2.8L IS lens steady at the 200mm length. A few photos were miss focused but I did manage to score a few decent shots. To my surprize there was in fact 2 adult eagles on the top of the building. Though I missed focus on the shots of them flying away. The lighting sucks but that’s alright, I put them through Lightroom, and then ran Noise Ninja in Photoshop.

If you click on either of the two above photos it will pop-up a 1024 pixel wide photo. I wonder what the photos would look like if I had something like the Canon EF 100-400 lens, yes a large prime lens would be even better!

Next week though we’re heading off to Brackendale to check out the Eagles. Brackendale is the world known for their Eagles as that’s were they head for the Winter seasons. Anyone want to lend me a 400mm or larger lens?