Cooper's Hawk Squawk

On Sunday I went to my local park to go for a walk. As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw this young Cooper's Hawk drying himself. Usually, I bring my camera and leave it in the trunk in case I see anything worth photographing. I guess I'm not back in my normal routines after our trip yet as I had forgotten it this morning. The bird seemed quite relaxed as several people walked past it on the walkway, so I drove back to our house (about 20 minutes roundtrip) and grabbed the camera. I thought the bird would probably be gone but it would be worth trying either way. Luckily, he was still there when I returned, I was able to gradually approach him and take a lot of images as he preened. At one point he looked at me and called a couple of times and then went back to preening himself. The encounter made my day for sure. This is cropped to vertical, one tiny piece of a branch that attached to nothing in the image removed from the bottom.

The bird was against our typical Northwest gray sky. I handled this the way I usually do in these cases, adding exposure compensation and moving the sky as far right in the histogram as possible without blowing it out, checking both the histogram and the highlights alerts on the back of the camera. I ended up adding 1.7 stops from the evaluative metering.

MkIII 500F4 1.4X 1/1000 F7.1 iso 640, evaluative metering +1.7, handheld