The boom of a rifle. A small hawk glides through the trees, lands between me and the faint yellow blotch of sun and waggles its tail.
hawks
Just as the sun strikes my face, in the corner of my eye a hawk sweeps into the woods. She ghosts past, flared tail orange among the leaves.
A succession of anxious or querulous calls—nuthatch, crow, Cooper’s hawk, pileated woodpecker—until sunrise reddens the western ridge.
Commotion from the Cooper’s hawks just inside the woods. One darts out and flies across the field: sleek missile body, thin blades of wings.
Two crows sail out of the woods with a smaller bird in hot pursuit: the Cooper’s hawk. He lands in the dead elm and ruffles his feathers.
A rare alarm call from one of the reclusive Cooper’s hawks nesting up in the woods. Sometimes I feel like a trespasser in my own front yard.
From the moment I come out, the world conspires to wake me up: yesterday, the tulip tree dropped a branch; today, a Cooper’s hawk swoops in.
Sun filtered by thin cirrostratus clouds. The hawk’s shadow is soft as a squirrel’s tail, but it still sets off all the alarms.
The Cooper’s hawk swoops down from the woods’ edge into the ditch and dips his beak again and again in its cold clear blood.
Dawn. The Cooper’s hawk is back, his kak-kak-kak echoing off the icy snow. I scan the trees, a haystack of branches, for that fierce needle.
A squirrel foraging in the leaves suddenly streaks for the nearest tree, barely escaping the sharp-shinned hawk hurtling through the forest.
A doe flees the urgent attentions of the resident 6-point, his burp-like grunts. Overhead, the loud cry of a crow chasing a hawk by itself.
The whining scold-calls of squirrels, agitation of chipmunks, denunciation of a crow: soundtrack for a gray morning with one white hawk.
Bright lights appear on a storm-felled locust below my parents’ house—reflections from the second-storey windows. A hawk’s swift shadow.