Birds of Illinois

Here's the first Photo Of The Week. The photo of the week is my personal favorite photo that was taken in the past week (and was not already in any story that I have posted). This week's winner is this Killdeer that I took at Glacial Park. This was one of those last minute shots - I had walked all the way back to the car and started to take my jacket off and put things away in the car when this Killdeer flew over and circled a couple of times. One of those times I snapped his portrait!

My new camera (Canon Rebel XTi) has allowed me to get a lot more flight shots than I've been able to get before because of the auto-focus ability of the camera + lens. I used to have to manually focus on birds in flight as the auto-focus wasn't very fast. Let me tell you, manually focusing on birds in flight is NOT easy!