These are updates I’ve posted to our neighborhood list-serve.

March 28, 2016

Again this year, red-shouldered hawks (Buteo linneatus) are nesting in a tall beech tree near Bel Pre Elementary School. If you stand on the old bridge over Bel Pre Creek and look up the macadam path toward the school, you’re also looking toward the nest. You may hear the clear whistled calls of the parent birds.

This wooded streamside supplies what red-shouldered hawks need for shelter and food. Tall deciduous trees, an open understory, frogs, toads, crayfish, voles, small snakes, large insects; it’s all good!

On Sunday, while I was watching the hawk nest, I heard a barred owl (Strix varia) call once.  These two apex predators hunt the same habitat—the hawk by day, the owl by night. We are fortunate to have this small bit of semi-natural woodland nearby.

April 16, 2016

Our red-shouldered hawks are on faithful duty at their nest near Bel Pre Elementary School. The nest is high in a beech tree so it’s hard to see the brooding bird unless she moves, but sometimes striped tail feathers stick out over the edge of the twiggy nest. Occasionally, downy feathers from the nest lining wave from outer twigs like tiny white flags.

The female hawk does most of the incubation. The smaller male brings food to her, and sometimes takes a turn sitting on the eggs while the female hunts. Whenever I witness that “changing of the guard,” I think how joyfully she must exchange her patient position for the glory of free flight.

Incubation takes about a month, so I’m estimating the eggs should hatch by the end of April. The female will tend the nestlings and the male will doubtless continue to be a good provider. I once saw a hawk plunge talons-down into the wetland pond near Rippling Brook, probably going for a frog. We’ll hope our male red-shouldered hawk can find plenty of frogs, mice, and even cicadas to feed his family this spring and summer.

Why do we write? Why do some of us have this urge, this need to find the right words to write on that blank page?

Possible answers: To try to make sense of what we’re experiencing. To help focus ourselves. To encourage others see/experience things they might not have before. To enhance living.

These thoughts arise because I’m reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, noted environmentalist, writer, and teacher. It’s a prose poem of a book by the author of the splendid Refuge, both of which are so personal that in my mind she’s a friend. This copy is from the library, but I’m going to have to buy my own.

When Terry’s mother was dying at 54, she told her daughter she would leave her all her journals, but not to look at them until after she died. When Terry could bear to take one of the bound journals from the long row on the shelf, she found it was blank. “My mother left me her journals, and all her journals were blank,” she writes. It was like a second death. When she herself turned 54, Terry wrote this book, subtitled “Fifty-four Variations on Voice,” to explore the messages contained in those blank journals.

Trying to understand, she thinks through her mother’s life, her own life, and the power of the word—its presence or absence. And she says, “To be read. To be heard. … To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice. Yet the emptiness of my mother’s journals carries the weight of a question, many questions.”

I am only on page 72 of 208 pages in Terry’s book. Will she decide the empty journals say silently that we waste time by writing instead of living? Was her mother asking why anyone would go back to look at written words later instead of staying in the moment?

I think Terry, a scholar in environmental humanities at the University of Utah, will say NO.  And I find that Terry’s clear clean writing makes me want to look more closely, be more thoughtful, study forever. Her writing makes me want to write.

The bad news? I didn’t have my camera. The good news? I didn’t have my camera. The occasion: red-shouldered hawks copulating!

Alerted by their squeaky sharp calls, I searched and found the pair well up in a maple tree on the hill above Bel Pre Creek. As I focused my binos, the birds finished, and the male dropped down to perch beside the female. I’m happy to say he didn’t roll over and go to sleep, but rubbed his head in seeming affection along her cheek and neck. That attended to, he began to do serious preening. She flew to another tree and perched there for maybe five minutes, while he worked through all his tail feathers. (Apparently when he gets that hot and bothered, it takes a while to tidy up.)

Hawk Habitat–woods and creek

When she flew again, this time toward the creek, I lost her. I went back to watching her mate preen. Suddenly she came winging through the trees, crossing in front of me. She carried a stick in her beak. She flew directly to the biggest beech tree at the left edge of the macadam path up to the school, paused a minute, and then flew away, beak empty.

I scanned the tree and found a cluster of sticks held in a crotch against the beech’s trunk, about 40 feet up. I was exultant. Now I know where this year’s nest is!

Why was it good that I didn’t have my camera? Because if it had been in my hands when the female flew away, I’d probably have stopped observing; I’d have stared down at the camera display, seeking the best photos of the pair and the preening male. Thus, I would have missed seeing the female streaking across my upper field of view carrying her stick to the nest.

Note to self: don’t stop looking!

  What a difference a week makes!   Let’s hear it for Spring!!

When my car was T-boned by a woman who ran a Stop sign, the repairs were expensive, but, and I stress this, not my fault. Because of the accident, State Farm raised my rates 25%. When I called my agent’s office in righteous indignation, they urged me to protest to the Maryland Insurance Administration. I did that. Turned out mine was not the only protest of that kind, and a few months later the MIA ruled for all of us against State Farm! My premium increases will be returned, with interest. Amazing. Take heart, all–sometimes the little guy wins one.