Short eared owl

Winter hunt

 

I have generally been reluctant to use my Nikon 1.4 teleconverter III, unless really needed, as I found the degraded sharpness and autofocus to be too great. However, this image was taken with the teleconverter on a 500 f4, but mounted on my new D500. The owl is sharp, even at ISO 1100. I'm thinking that acuity may not have been the problem in the past, but rather the slower autofocus of my D7000, D800E and even the D810.

Done