… Then things got a little weird.  The bald eagle landed on the top of another tree.  It remained there for about a minute before another large bird swooped in from somewhere and chased it off its perch.  The other bird (later identified as a red-tailed hawk) then took the eagle’s perch.  The eagle did a couple of fly by laps, sort of circling the tree with the hawk in it before departing to the north.  Once the eagle was out of the picture, the hawk took off as well.

This photo is of the eagle during one of his laps.  If you’re looking for a near impossible photographic task, try manually focusing and manually metering a shot of a flying bird that is hauling tail feathers.  When I saw that I’d gotten this image, I couldn’t believe it.  It wasn’t blurry, the bald eagle was very visible and stretched out fully.  I was happy.

As an aside, I want to point out that, while it might appear that there is an HDR halo around the eagle, it’s purely due to the positioning of the eagle’s body against the lighter background and not due to some bad post work.

You can see the best photo I took of the bald eagle here.