Coming in

Our favorite spot in Scotland was a small town on the SW coast, Kirkcudbright. A wonderful, non crowded small town with a terrific hotel, great restaurants and beautiful, peaceful walk ways along the marina and loch. We stayed there for a full week. The primary reason we stayed there for an extended period of time was the terrific bird hides of Alan MacFadyen. We visited at least one per day photographing many of the resident birds of Scotland and a few mammals. With modern cameras, it is relatively easy to get images of birds flying away from a perch; it is much more difficult to get these BIF images of birds flying into a perch. This is a Eurasian Sparrowhawk. Very similar in behavior to our Cooper’s Hawks in the US, these birds feed on birds, small mammals, and even large insects. We were fortunate enough to be able to photograph both males and females.