Bright sunlight glinting off the fresh snow: an ideal morning to go traipse around Prospect Park in the hope of finding something good to shoot. Today it didn’t take me long. I heard a call that I took to be a hawk’s and followed it in the untouched snow, loving my new Canadian boots with every step, till I saw him way up, looking down, very interested in something. Red-tail hawk, a common sight in the park. We studied each other for a while, and I thought it was me that he was curious about. But I kept hearing that call, and he obviously wasn’t the one making it, because his beak remained closed. He was interested in it too, because he kept flitting around, trying to get close to it, just like I was. And I kept missing his takeoffs, with the bulky 300mm lens I was hand-holding plus a 1.7 converter that slowed focus down a lot. Hard to track things in flight with it, but great for bringing them close when they stop on a branch: And then I caught a a very small movement with the corner of my eye. Of course! Squirrel! He (she?) was stock-still on a branch, making insistent calls — a strange regular beep-beep noise, probably distress calls to fellow squirrels. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, not moving from the branch that offered camouflage, maybe hoping that the hawk would get bored or just move on to something easier. Eventually it was the big human with the red jacket that saved his ass. I made an inadvertent noise while trying to find a better shot, and the hawk took off for good, startled or just plain annoyed that I wouldn’t just beat it and let him take care of business. The squirrel kept making that call for a while, though. You never know. As for me, I went on towards the south end of the park, hoping that my perseverance through midcalf-height snow would be rewarded. And it was, in a minor way, with the sight of a beautiful red-bellied woodpecker. Not bad for a casual morning jaunt.