Birding in Brooklyn... on a Bike

Back in the middle of May, I was riding round Prospect Park in Brooklyn (who official web site looks whiz bang but boring, I prefer the direct access to content of the Wiki entry), and I was just about to leave when I realized that there was a hawk on the ground just in front of me.

The bird was about 10 to 15 meters away from me, so I was going to have to zoom
in all the way with my Coolpix 5700 - the equivalent of 280mm on a 35mm
camera. It was also a fairly dull day, so exposure time was going to be
long. as it turned out, about a 70th of a second was what the program
mode chose. Hand held was out of the question, even for the likes of me
who thinks he can hand-hold a camera longer than anyone else. :-).

Fortunately I had recently purchased a nice accessory: a Manfroto Magic Arm, complete with Super Clamp and camera platform, which I got for a great price
on eBay. The arm was securely clamped to my bike's crossbar, where it
sits out of the way as I ride the bike. All I had to do was set the
bike up on its kickstand, whip out the camera and mount it on the arm,
attach the shutter release cable and I was ready to go.

The results are shown below. These are 50% crops of the original images,
with a little sharpening, but otherwise untouched shots.

At first he was content to pluck his catch with me looking on, but some other people also stopped to watch, and he got spooked and flew off to a more secure dining spot.