Hunting Hobbies
Every year I delight in watching the amazing skills of hunting Hobbies with the dragonfly challenge dominating the late April - May scene. This year I have mainly been using the Canon R62 and the Canon RF 100-500 sometimes with the 1.4x extender but it has been a pretty hot spring and there has been a lot of atmospheric distortion even at pretty close range so there have been an awful lot of deletions! Catching the moment the bird homes in and snatches the dragonfly in flight is a real challenge and even if you can half predict the snatch the bird often jinks up or left or right and can disappear out of the frame particularly when they are close enough to produce a decent sized image. Using the R62 on its maximum of 40 frames per second I did eventually manage one sequence of a bird catching a Hairy Dragonfly that I was pretty pleased with but it was a pretty heavy crop and I still endeavour to get some bigger and better images and it would be good to get them lower down with a backdrop but due to the ehat they have almost invariably been hunting high us this spring. White skies have also been the norm with few days when blue has been in evidence.
Hobby just about to snatch a Hairy Dragonfly - these insects are clearly very rich in protein as the birds often hunt for about an hour a day and end up with a full crop before drifting off to perch up and digest.
Hobby just after the snatch - dragonflies are typically dismembered in flight with the wings being dropped and the juicy bits consumed ina few seconds
the dramatic manoeuvres produced by birds hunting insects are a sight to behold
A flight portrait with a blue sky backdrop for a change
From the small head and delicate look this is a male
Birds sometimes produce vertical stoops of up to 200 feet to take up coming dragons
Dragonflies are held in the foot and eaten on the wing
