About getting too close to hawks

Cathedral of St. John the Divine fledgling
Photo by Robert B. Schmunk [see letter below]


888 7th Ave. kid
Photo by Bruce Yolton


In regard to the 888 7th Avenue fledgling, whose picture was posted here recently with Bruce Yolton in the background, yesterday Bruce posted [on http://www.urbanhawks.blogs.com] the picture above, taken at the same time, but with another photographer in the background. Bruce writes:

Lincoln Karim and I were shooting from opposite sides, and both managed to get blurry pictures of each other. (Although our pictures might make us look like we're close to the fledgling, we both kept a safe distance. Our telephoto lenses flatten the depth of field.)

One of the Cathedral hawkwatchers, Robert B Schmunk,[check out his website http://www.bloomingdalevillage.blogspot.com sent a note about the issue of photographer closeness, and included a photo of their handsome fledgling:

Marie,

In your Wednesday blog post, you reprinted comments from John Blakeman about the CP South hawk baby ["Ziggy"] letting people get rather close while she was hanging about the croquet lawn on Tuesday evening. Hawkwatchers in the city have, of course, seen this before. And in fact Ziggy was not the only fledgling exhibiting such behavior Tuesday evening. Attached is a picture of "Brownie" from the nest at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (so named because she has a heavier belly band than her sibilings) taken from a distance of 15-20 feet. Around 8:00, she was hunting, or trying to anyway, in the close on the south side of the cathedral as a few of us watched. When last seen on Tuesday, it looked like Brownie was going to try to roost in a tree on Amsterdam Avenue. I suspect either the robins or the sirens of vehicles from the nearby fire station or hospital eventually convinced her to try somewhere else.

-- Robert B. Schmunk