Stepped out this evening to go for a walk and found this feller next to my shop. A juvenile hawk, it didn’t seem to be in a hurry to wander off. Some neighbors and I stood around looking at it like… well, like people standing around looking at a hawk. As this was well after the Department of Wildlife had closed for the night (and the weekend), we got lucky in waving down a passing state trooper. Who, as it turns out, was a former wildlife warden and was about as nonchalant as you could hope. He simply and easily bundled it in a thick blanket and took it off to a bird rehab place, as it was too young to fly back up to where it should have been.
I knew something was up about 20 minutes earlier. There were a bunch of birds chirping their damnfool heads off all day… and they suddenly got *real* quiet. At the same time, Speedbump was in a back window and suddenly went buggo, running from window to window.