Well it wasn’t Sidney Poitier that’s for sure.

Things were just winding down for the evening when the Beloved Significant Other announced that there was a raptor eating a bird in our drive. I ran and grabbed the the first camera to hand with a long lens attached – my Canon 80d with Sigma 150-600mm lens. Using the dustbins as cover I managed to get quite close. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at in terms of species – at first I thought it was a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) but I wasn’t entirely convinced. I did know what it was eating – a Laughing Dove (Streptopelia senegalensis) as there are plenty of them in the neighbourhood. It was quite a nervous bird constantly scanning the environment between mouthfuls. Like most raptors it had merely stunned its prey and it was a bit hard to watch as the dove squirmed about while being eaten. It died when the contents of the chest cavity were removed. But that’s nature for you – incredibly beautiful but undoubtedly cruel.

 

I didn’t look at the photos until the morning. First off I marvelled at how well the 80d coped. It was the last stages of dusk and quite dark which meant using ISO 12800. The files were incredibly noisy but they cleaned up very well in Topaz DeNoise AI. The autofocus system on the 80d is very primitive compared to modern mirrorless cameras that now have bird detect autofocus, but it did a great job with only a couple of frames out of the 200 I shot being out of focus.

What was the bird? Well it wasn’t a Peregrine Falcon, but a  Collared Sparrowhawk (Accipiter cirrhocephalus).