Hawk Sightings

Maybe it’s just Autumn and they’re more active than usual, but the hawk’s have been out. Everywhere I’ve turned, just about. You can hear their piercing cries in the cloudless blue sky, but I’ve been seeing them, as though they’re tying to tell me something. Of course, I could just be egocentric about the whole thing…maybe I’m just choosing to notice them. Anyway, here’s a list of the recent sightings:

1. Outside an office building, where my husband had run in to drop off some paperwork. I was sitting in the car and then realized that there was an honest-to-goodness breeze blowing, so I turned off the radio and the car and stepped outside. Immediately there was a piercing cry, undercut by the rumbling of some heavy machinery just beyond a line of trees around the parking area. I looked up, scanning the sky, and then he came careening over the tree tops, screeching away at the rumbling machines, from the look of it. I lost sight of him for a few minutes and just walked under the trees, taking in the first hint of fall weather, when he came back over the treetops once more, flying lower, and I could see his belly feathers and head pretty clearly. His head was to the side, and I knew that he was looking at me the way birds do, with that one eye…he flicked his head from one side to the other as I waved up at him. Then he disappeared back over the tree line. I bet they’d done something to one of his favorite roosting spots.

2. Came out of a friend’s front door, which is perched up on a hill from the driveway, and there on the roof of my little Nissan was perched a red-tailed hawk, sitting pretty as you please. They have lots of chipmunks and squirrels that run all over the streets and driveways there, so I’m sure he was just taking advantage of a closer vantage point. He was glorious to behold! I could see the yellow of his beak and the dark rim of his eye, not to mention the tiny black flecks dotting his snowy belly feathers. I was trying to quietly call for my friend and the kids to come see him, which of course, let him know that he had been spotted, so he silently opened his beautiful wings and took off just as graceful as you please. He flew up into a pine tree across the street, unperturbed by our pointing and ooing and ahhing. So majestic.

3. Parked in front of the house and climbed out to a relatively silent community, only to catch the shrilling of a pair of hawks circling overhead. The dipped their wing-tips and waggled on the precipice of the wind, balancing and calling to each other, subtly shifting their balance whenever the other came too close…perhaps they were a mating pair, or they were being territorial. Sometimes it’s very hard to discern the difference, in all species.

4. And last, the one on top of a phone pole alongside a highway, his feathers fluffed so that he resembled a huge ball of whitish-grey fuzz to protect him against a drizzling rain. But as always, that alert head twisting to and fro, pointed beak outlined against the grey sky.