Feathery Friday: Peregrine Falcon with Lunch

Peregrine Falcons are a dominant predator of other birds, able to dive at amazing speed and knocking a bird out of the air using a reinforced breast bone. They are one of the great successes of the conservation movement, once almost completely eliminated from many parts of the US by pesticides, populations have bounced back and the species is, while still protected, considered of least concern. We’ve seen a nice increase in the populations in Santa Clara county. I was surprised, though, to run into one in Coyote Valley one morning, where it had just hunted a Red-Winged Blackbird and was now sitting down to a meal. I try to be very careful about getting close to feeding or nesting birds to avoid stressing them, but this one seemed not at all worried about me and sat there enjoying its meal.

Fuji X-T2, 100-400 + 1.4X TC @ 560mm, 1/680 seconds at F/8, ISO 1500