Original Goatsucker

[perruche_verte]

Tonight: a great flock, a great aerial squadron of nighthawks in the twilight sky, soaring, circling, diving all together, the sharp eerie "peeet" of their calls bouncing off the roofs and pavement. These birds in late summer were the music of my childhood

Comments

[eatsoylentgreen]

we need to have dinner, you and I, sometime soon.

[springbok1]

It's amazing to me how many people walk right by really amazing birds and don't see them. I once saw a big Cooper's hawk up in a tree - right on a walking path. It was spring, so the trees were still mostly bare, and the hawk was starkly visible. I didn't understand how anyone walking by could miss it, but I sat and watched it for 20 minutes, and none of the other passers-by on the path noticed it.

[perruche_verte]

I love hawks but I have a hard time distinguishing one raptor from another, beautiful as they are. Any big hawk around where I grew up was likely to be a red tailed hawk: if it was small, it was a kestrel. Now I'm in a slightly different region and it seems like there's more variety here

[perruche_verte]

I thought the great blue was pretty much universal in North America, but they might be rare or absent in some local areas. They are one of my all time favorite birds. I always thought they looked like old grey wizards or sorcerors.

Normally they are pretty shy, but like a number of other bird species, I think they are beginning to learn that humans in urban areas don't pose that much of a threat to them.

[bluedragonflye]

There is some value in that: for one thing, it gives you some protection against the idea that people who are authorities and have written books invariably know more than you, and should always be trusted.

Some insecure people feel threatened by the idea that others know more than they do, as it calls into question the quality of their own intelligence/knowledge. At least, I used to have a friend who told me this is how he felt about people who knew things he didn't

I was pretty taken the first time I saw a nighthawk at WRC. Unfortunately, they tend not to do well with the stress of captivity. I don't know that I ever saw one survive to recovery.