At any rate, I'm strolling down the alley in the bitter cold on the way to lunch when I hear a frantic racket of chirping coming from its boughs.
I glance over and there's a small mob of sparrows, little spherical feathered balls that frantically bouncing up and down and hopping from branch to branch and yelling for all they're worth.
Normally, being at eye level in the bare branches there, if I turned and looked right at them, they'd skitter off to someplace safer, but their attention is absolutely fixed on something other than me, so I glanced up into the tree to see what had them so worked up.
Ah, trespassers!
The cardinals around here have been extremely camera-shy in my experience. Just turning and looking at them will have them dart away to safety before I could even get my camera to eye level, but these two were as intent on the sparrows as the latter were on them.
Mr. and Mrs. Redbird obviously wanted to horn in on the smaller birds' winter larder.
I found myself wishing for a longer lens or more megapickles. The 70-200mm on the APS-H sensor of my EOS-1D Mark III gave me an effective maximum equivalent focal length of 260mm, and the 10MP sensor on the older DSLR didn't allow for a ton of cropping. I'm keeping an eye out at Roberts, hoping they get a good used 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS lens in on trade. That would be a good lens for shooting classes and matches, too...
