Northern Harrier

Confession: I've become somewhat obsessed with photographing harriers in flight during winter, which must be obvious because I post so many of them. I think it's because of a combination of factors - their beauty, my fascination with their behaviors and the fact that I have access to a few of them. But it's also because of the difficulties involved in photographing them well. Getting close is often a challenge, as is getting light in their deeply set eyes especially when they're looking straight down as they nearly always do when hunting. Case in point: yesterday I took 32 gigs of images (almost 1200 shots with the 7D), mostly of harriers. Out of that number I may have a half dozen images that I quite like. This is one of them.

7D, 1/1600, f/7.1, ISO 400, 500 f/4 (no tc), shot from pickup window, cropped to 51% of original image, not baited

Comments/critique appreciated