Peeking into the rock

I thought it might serve to post a couple pictures of the Newt Migration Adventure.( It's quite a few pictures )

I don't know about the baby hawk Nadine says she saw. What I saw today was just an adult hawk hanging out on a snag, turning its head in a direction that forced me to photograph it into the light. I could get really close to the dead tree, but since it is what? 50 feet? tall -- my house is 25 feet at the peak and if I imagine two of them stacked on top of each other I guess that's about how tall it is -- there were diminishing returns when I got too close because I had a bad angle on the thing.

So these are cropped, not resized, and that's just the quality you get with the zoom out past the max optical and into the digital (is it necessarily the case as I have found that the digital zoom is just not as clean as the optical? -- and do other cameras send you through the optical zoom and then stack digital on top of it when you run out of optical?). The nice fellow has been begging to buy me a telephoto lens and I finally said he can, and a wide-angle one because I keep not being able to get a good handle on landscapes, and he can buy me a tripod too because if I'm going to do more bird and landscape pictures I need to be a lot steadier.

( our raptor friend lurks behind the cut )