Red-tailed Hawk

I haven't mastered taking pictures of birds in flight yet. I have two problems. Either the focus is bad and/or the bird is terribly underexposed against the bright sky. Case in point, I ran across five or six Turkey Vultures a week or so ago both roosting in some tall pines and circling near by. I took a couple hundred pictures of what looked like fantastic images though the viewfinder, but when I downloaded them to my computer, I was disappointed to find that all of the pictures I took of the Vultures flying overhead were under exposed with very little detail. I had even adjusted the exposure on my camera to help compensate for this problem.
It's with this and other experiences in mind that I wasn't too hopeful that these shots of a Red-tailed Hawk I took at Jackson Bottom Wetlands Preserve would turn out well. I almost didn't bother to shoot them. But when I transferred them to my computer, I was pleasantly surprised. A longer lens would helped out with the grain as I had to crop quite a bit to fill the frame, but all-in-all, these didn't turn out too bad.