Some days, you just get lucky...

First up, thanks to this great Marymoor birding blog, I knew there were some Cooper's Hawks nesting in the park.  I had vague sense of the location and it took me ~20 minutes of searching the trees to find it.  Here's a picture of what I believe are two young Cooper's Hawks:



Check out the claws on the one on the right.  Cooper's Hawks eat other birds, and I wouldn't want to be the bird on the other end of those talons.

Here's the nearby nest with what I believe are a parent and two young:




I was feeling pretty lucky after I got the above shots.  Then, as I'm walking on a random trail to another part of the park, I catch some motion out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head and about 5 feet in front of my face are several hummingbirds feeding from some flowers.




(higher res version in smugmug)


(higher res version in smugmug)

I believe all of these are female Anna's Hummingbirds.

I've seen photos like the above before, and I've seen hummingbirds in the wild, but I never thought I'd be able to grab photos like these in the wild.  I only had a few seconds and then they were gone.  I hung out for several minutes to see if they would come back, but they never did.  If that's not luck, I don't know what is.

I have to say, I am in love with the Canon 100-400L.  So many times before I've been in situations like today where I see a great shot and I haven't been able to grab it.  That doesn't happen much any more.  I also continue to be very impressed with the performance of the Canon 20D, especially considering it's 4 year old technology at this point.