Amazing

The girls and I watched this hawk hunting for awhile at Brick Pond today. He saw us too. (From here on out I’m calling it “he,” because “it” seems not quite right…)

Older Daughter showed great patience. She wanted to see him take off, or pounce on something. Eventually her patience paid off; he crossed the water and we lost sight of him — till he flew into a tree on our side, about five feet from us.

He sat there through a battery change in my camera, and my daughters’ whispered exultation. Then he pounced on a mouse right in front of us, and took it to a tree next to our car. It was as if he wanted his activities documented.

He polished off the mouse in about 3 minutes. I thought of the line from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe: “There’s nothing better than fish that were alive a half hour ago, and came out of the pan half a minute ago.” But in this case, it’s “There’s nothing better than a mouse that was alive a minute ago, and is now in my crop.”

Then he wiped his beak and jumped handily to a post-meal perch.

It was unusual… I remember watching a documentary about Pale Male, and how close people would come to the Central Park hawks — and how foolish that was. But in any case we weren’t harmed; he came to us, rather than vice versa. And there were no visible injuries, and no problems with his hunting ability — that’s for sure.

We left him looking regal in the waning sunlight.