Weather permitting, I ride around every afternoon looking for photo opportunities when making animal checking rounds. Sometimes the husband is with me, sometimes, in fact many times not. Today was a good day, actually an awesome day for being out and about. The weather was beautiful and mild with the sun shining brightly and that lovely afternoon glow that is perfect for taking photos.

This gorgeous creature was in the ditch on the side of the road enjoying his meal when I happened upon him. Normally, they flee in flight if they get any indications you are slowing down. This fellow just didn’t care. I stopped, backed up, rolled down my window and started shooting. I snapped pictures from 5:01 p.m. until 5:04 p.m. with many shots in that three minutes. All but one of the 23 pictures I took in that time frame are good. A second full-sized photo of this handsome bird is on my photoblog also.

To see the hawk’s behavior, you can click on the slide show below. These photos are not that great cause they’ve been resized and optimized, but you can see it wasn’t a bit intimidated by me.