Cooper or Sharp Shined Hawk?

 Sometimes a photo opportunity just falls into one's lap and so one has to take advantage of the situation.

This particular hawk and its mate seem to have a nest high up the trees close to our house.

Several times this summer, my husband who gets up way before me to go to work, saw the hawk scoping our yard. Sometimes he would just sit on the fence other times he would just fly over. Each time after the sighting my husband would say, wish you were up you could have taken its photo. As mu as I like photography, I like my beauty sleep more, so getting up early in hopes of catching this guy for a photo shoot was not in the realm of reality.

As the saying goes " Good things come to those who wait. A good thing did come along for me. One morning after I had gone to my normal routine, looked out the window and saw his majestic self sitting on the fence.

I knew if tried to open the sliding door to step outside and capture his photograph, he would be gone in a blink.  Therefor, from inside the house through the glass door with my 500mm lens attached to the Nikon D750 I started clicking away.  Capturing a few of him his movements.

This whole process of looking this way and that way, took about three minutes. And then he was gone. To be honest I wondered if he was waiting for my little chipmunk friend who resides under our patio and not seeing him anywhere around he chose to leave. 

Maybe one of these days I will get lucky and he will return and sit for a while, giving me the opportunity to photograph him again. This time, I hope to have better photos. It was suggested that if I raise my f/stop to about 1600 I would have a better chance of capturing a much sharper photo than the ones I have taken so far. 

We shall see if I get lucky.😊

Incidentally I have no idea which type of hawk this is. I had never heard of a sharp shined hawk until a friend brought it. Apparently there is a size difference between the two, one being smaller than the other.