Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Hawk

This afternoon I picked up a Presbyterian minister from San Francisco, at the Humphrey Terminal.

We were exiting the airport onto 34th Ave. South, and I was driving about 30 mph.

All of a sudden a red-tailed hawk, sailed right over the roof of the van, , dived down right in front of us, and stormed down to the ground where an English house sparrow was feeding in the grass. The sparrow saw the incoming, airborne attacker, and dodged out of way, so the hawk missed his prey.

He immediately wheeled right and few two hundred feet west and disappeared behind a building.

It is likely the same hawk I saw a week earlier 1/4 mile farther north on the corner of the federal cemetery, where he flew up to a post, and commenced to eat a striped gopher that he just caught.

Such a close encounter and such a tight interaction between man and his technology, and a bird of prey in hot pursuit of his next meal was startling, and fascinating at the same time.

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