Shooting birds...

...with my camera of course and they are only the hens of our chicken coop but still they look quite birdy, don't they?

The discipline in our coop is pretty loose so they have decided, on their own, that the carob tree is a much more appropriate home than the one we have built for them! I do enjoy though watching them nesting on the tree branches like true birds. I wonder some times what they do when it is raining but I am not curious enough to go out in the rain and find out :)

It has been 3 months since the last time I took my camera to capture some images of my feathered friends and I realise now that for one more year we were way too reluctant to take the young roosters away from the hens and you can see the results of that negligence on their plucked backs. Every summer our hens hatch their eggs and since it is a random procedure, we usually end up with more roosters than we need. Till the following spring the young roosters are eager to perform their manly duties but since they are too many, they end up hurting the hens.

The shooting was going just fine when the alarm went off. If you have any experience with hens you'll now that if they feel threatened they start clucking. First it is one and then all together shouting like crazy and running hysterically around the coop. The truth is that I can't blame them. Pointing at them with an enormous 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens is quite intimidating :)

For some reason they felt that the safest thing to do is to get out of the tree and hide in some bushes, not very successfully I might add :)

Finally they relaxed and returned to the carob tree to nest for the night. I am sorry that I upset them but I am sure that they won't hold it against me :)