Red-tailed hawk on spire

Pam had been at the church all day. Late afternoon, she called to tell me that one of the red-tailed hawks was sitting on the church spire. I rushed over and there it was. Unusually, in my experience, it was facing east. I should mention that it was very overcast and so the original images I took were rather dark. I had to do significant post-processing on the computer to get the color into these shots, particularly the ones of the bird in flight.



While it is not obvious from this picture, it started issuing loud calls. It hunched its shoulders a little as it did this, and you can just about see that in this shot.



Thinking/hoping that it was calling to its mate, I rushed around to the front of the church, scanning the sky. But no, it was not calling its mate; rather, it was preparing to itself take to the sky.



Take off!



At first, it worked hard to gain height.



It looped around a couple of times before flying off to the west.