For the Birds

As many of you know, I like having birds in my yard.  Lots of birds.  There's one bird however that leaves me with mixed feelings.  Every winter a sharp shinned hawk decides our back yard is her private dining room.  I'm no expert, but I think she's a female because of her size and with this breed the females are almost twice the size of their male counterparts.  Sometimes she shows up on consecutive days and sometimes she only appears a couple of times a week.  But always, when she leaves there is one less little bird at our feeders.  I love watching her; she's truly a beautiful bird, yet I feel sad each time she kills one of the little birds whose only crime was looking for a free meal.

I didn't take the picture above, but merely borrowed it from another web site.  I do take most of the photographs I use on my blog and that brings me to a point of gratitude.  I'm grateful for cameras and even more grateful for how easy it is to edit and print photoes today.  I got my first camera when I was twelve or thirteen, a gift from my older brothers.  It was just a little Brownie Kodak, but for years it was the only camera I owned and I took a lot of pictures with it.  Unfortunately getting those pictures developed and printed was expensive and somewhere around here I still have a few rolls of film I never did get developed.  My next camera was a Cannon that wasn't even really mine.  When I started out as a reporter, my editor put it in my hands and informed me I was expected to take my own photos to accompany the articles I wrote.  Next came a Fujica with all kinds of lens to choose from.  I fell in love with that camera and when I left journalism, my publisher allowed me to keep it in lieu of two weeks of vacation time.  My last few years as a reporter and editor, the paper hired a part time photographer who loved teaching me how to use that camera for best results.  In time several of my children borrowed that camera to use in college or high school photography classes.  Now I mostly use a little digital camera.  I miss those super lenses on my old camera, but it is so worth it to be able to pop that little plastic square out of my camera and into my computer and voila!  I have pictures.

But that hawk is a sneaky lady.  She eludes my camera with incredible skill leaving me with fuzzy pictures--but one of these days, I'll get a really good shot like the one above of her.