Motif: Blue-Throated Macaw at Nest Hole

I meant to post all this week -- parrots I've got! Macaws introduced me to birding and bird photography. This is a blue-throated macaw, currently the rarest macaw remaining in the wild. It's slightly smaller and lots meaner than the B&G. Numbers are estimated between 50-125 in the wild; a lot more live in captivity and would have been much easier to photograph, but where's the story in that? So a few years ago I joined a group of parrot-philes on a trip to rural Bolivia where we sat for hours in a blind with several billion mosquitoes waiting for the birds to return to their nest cavity. They had a knack for hanging out just outside of lens range. No doubt they were aware of us and leery but we realized over time they were more concerned about the crested cara-caras that would harrass them but didn't quite have the nerve to enter their nest hole. Anyway this was taken after sunset, with my old D30 at ISO 1600, f/4.5 and 1/8 sec and the 500mm f/4.5 lens -- this is one of the sharpest I got under the circumstances. I cropped about 30% of the original image and cloned out some bright sky in the RU corner.