I’ve been drooling over pictures taken at this nest.  I finally asked Michael Libbe where it is and made the trip there myself.  The nest is on top of a platform on top of a telephone pole in downtown Winter Park.  The really great part is that there’s a 4-story parking garage right across from the nest.  You drive to the top, park, and look out over the nest.  The green trees and brick buildings make for awesome bokeh (especially with The Beast!)

The baby is already pretty big.  When I arrived, he was napping in the nest while his mom stood close by.  And that’s pretty much all that happened while I was there!  I was there till sunset, and the most exciting thing to happen at the nest was a little wing-stretching.  So I put some teleconverters on The Beast and went for birdie portraits instead…

This one of the mom was taken with the 2x and 1.4x teleconverters stacked.  I used LiveView to refine the focus.

The baby has already learned good house-keeping skills: always aim the dirty stuff away from the center of the nest!

I liked the symmetry in this shot.  Both birds were keeping a close eye on the blackbirds that were flying around the nest.

It was fun to watch how observant the baby is.  He’d spot another bird flying by his nest and you could see his little head moving to follow that bird.  I got a good example of this in a video.  I thought it was funny how he had to quickly switch eyes mid-trajectory…he wants to have an owl’s neck!