Wild Harris Hawk at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Musem
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, AZ Dec 27, 2006 — The Harris Hawk is a very interesting bird. First of all this raptor hunts in packs unlike most raptors. Second, the females are generally about 35% larger than the males.
This photo is interesting in that because the birds hunt in groups on occasion when a raptor exhibit is underway a wild hawk or two will help the hunting demonstration. That is what happened here.
This wild harris hawk decided to join another harris hawk being shown to the folks at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum during a demonstration. Apparently this happens frequently.
Because of the group effort these birds can take down game larger than a bird alone could take down.
I haven’t processed this photo before because of the background. I really liked the photo but the background was stark grey. It had absolutely no interest at all. So I decided to turn it into a stark white background and for some demented reason I can live with that. Go figure…
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I imported and tagged the photo with Photo Mechanic. I used Adobe Lightroom for adding color profiles, basic adjustments, and exporting jpgs from the raw to simulate HDR. I used Photomatix to tone-map the images into an HDR image. I spruced-up the image using the Topaz plug-ins: Denoise, Detail, and Adjust, then touched-up the image using Adobe Photoshop.
PENTAX K10D
SMC Pentax-FA J 75-300mm ƒ4.5-5.8 AL
ISO 800, ƒ5.6, 1/1000
