After snapping a few pictures, I go back in the house. A while later, I check again. He's still out there, but now a bit higher up in the lowest bough of our tree. And he's left me the dead bird.
He waits there all afternoon until I clean up the corpse, then next time I check, he's gone.
Until yesterday. I go out to check the mail and he's in the yard, tangled in a mess of plastic something. I go to get him and he hops right to me. I place him in a box and call raptor rescue. The bird lady came by today to bring him back, plastic free and with a shiny new band. I watched as she "called" his family with a tape recorder with the Kestrel call and a bullhorn. My neighbors must have thought pterodactyls were attacking. But sure enough, we heard the answer and as soon as he was let go, 3 more hawks from 3 different directions swooped in and tackled him mid-flight. (Bird lady explained it as a sort of sibling "hello"). So fucking cool.
Also, I've discovered that I really really like veggie sushi. Yum Yum. Anyone wanna go?
So get this... about a week ago, I go out in the yard to let the dogs out and I'm standing there waiting for them to do their business and I turn and find myself nose to beak with a hawk sitting in my bush. This is quite unusual because a) I live in a pretty urban area and b) the bush is not very big. I panicked at first because I thought it was injured and bleeding (we have a lot of stray cats on our street), but it turned out it was holding a dead baby starling. But it just sat there at eye level, with the dogs right within striking distance, staring at me.
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you are awesome, though. how cool that the rescue lady brought him back to his family! oh! I'm just tickled!
finally, I think you'd be near the top of the list of people I'd like to have sushi with. so why do you have to live so far away?