Red-tailed hawk.
Lying in bed this morning, half a minute from sleep, I listened to the songs of the resident cardinal. He had three of them. One began with a couple upswept calls, then a rapid series of downswept ones; another song amounted to a long set of double notes; and I can’t recall the third one at the moment. I also heard a titmouse. And readying breakfast, out the window I watched a couple of the neighborhood crows.
I didn’t get out until mid-afternoon. However, I could see out my big south windows that the sky was for the second day utterly cloudless. Not a shred of white or flimsy hazy gray interrupted the vault of purest blue. Kind of scary. [Note: if you haven’t followed this blog for long, you likely don’t know I get nervous about slipping away into the uninterrupted vacuum on utterly cloudless days like this.] By 2 or 2:30, I had a little trouble shielding my eyes from the brilliant, reflected sun. A couple times of year it gets like that—late winter being one.
When the jogger appeared today, I counted only eight crows in the utility lines above him. I wonder where the ninth went.
And on my regular trip to town I saw the usual suspects: herring gull, ring-bill, pigeon. Then I headed for Beech Hill.
It was a quick trip—up and down the wooded trail in not quite 45 minutes. But I counted chickadees and resident robins, and the mourning dove calling from the summit. Soon after hearing the dove, I emerged from the woods out into the section of trail bordering an eastern field, and right away I spotted a hawk, a buteo, sitting alone in a bare hardwood across the way. I hadn’t brought my binoculars, so I snapped a couple quick photos, wondering if perhaps it was the young red-shouldered hawk that’s been hanging out around here this winter. However, when it saw me, maybe 100 yards away, it took wing immediately—whereas the juvenile red-shouldered was relatively tame.
I got pictures of the raptor soaring down the slope. Later, I confirmed it as a redtail. On the trip down, I heard more chickadees, more robins. And on the drive home, out in Clam Cove, I saw a solitary bufflehead.
The cloudlessness continued well into night. Orion is moving off into the sunlit part of the sky, but other constellations shone brightly. Standing for a while on my back deck, I heard no American woodcocks, as I’d kind of hoped to.
Today’s List
Northern cardinal
Tufted titmouse
American crow
Herring gull
Ring-billed gull
Rock pigeon
Mallard
Black-capped chickadee
American robin
Mourning dove
Red-tailed hawk
Bufflehead
Tags: American crow, American robin, black-capped chickadee, bufflehead, herring gull, mallard, mourning dove, northern cardinal, red-tailed hawk, ring-billed gull, rock pigeon, tufted titmouse
