We went to the BBG today, fairly early, and it was fairly quiet. We entered the rose garden, and were walking down the center part, and we came upon this hawk, just hanging out at ground level. At first I thought it must be a dummy to keep the pigeons out or something, but it was the real thing. We were probably withing 8 feet of him, and I was able to carefully move around him to take shots at various angles. We and two other people just watched him for about ten minutes. An oblivious couple with a baby carriage approached, making the hawk nervous. He flew off the lightpost on the ground to a higher elevation, as you can see, then the noise freaked him out and he took off.

I was pissed that I left my 'real' camera home, and only had my Canon G10 with me. While it's a damned good point and shoot, nevertheless, it's still a p&s. Some, not all, of the shots are not in focus. I assume that's because I have it set for wide area focus. I'll have to change that. I've left a couple of full frame shots in so you can get a sense of how close we were. Most of the rest are cropped.