Red-tailed Hawk

This is a young red-tailed hawk. Its tail is, as you can see, not yet red. The most interesting thing about this photo is that it was taken with my new iPhone 14. They said it has various better things about the camera - and it turns out that in fact it has a 3x zoom which is a good deal better than the previous iterations of zoom. This is cropped, of course, but this shot would absolutely not have been even remotely as decent as this with my older iPhone (12).

Catching the RTHA was pure luck because what I was actually doing was taking a shot of a turkey vulture that was sitting in the dead tree - mostly just as an experiment to see how well the zoom worked. He suddenly took off and I saw that what had spooked him was the arrival of a hawk, so I shifted to shooting the hawk. And then the hawk took off. The "live" feature of the camera made it possible for me to isolate this particular moment.

Anyhoo. There we are.