Mating Kestrels

With a cold north wind blowing from the north I decided to work my way along part of the south coast this morning on the lookout for some Kestrel mating behaviour at a location where I had worked with them recently.

I was not to be disappointed as the birds at my first stop were looking promising but with two aborted attempts time was eventually running out when this fine pair of birds got it all together in a prominent position at a reasonable distance.

Due to the birds selected mating position which was unfortunately shaded I ended up on ISO 1400 to compensate exposure for my 850mm lens set at minimum F6.7 and 1/3200 sec to freeze the action over distance but I ran off a total of 132 images of the mating sequence at 12 frames a second all of which were sharp except for the last male exit shot so I was a happy bunny !!