A couple of weeks ago, RegularDad and I were sitting on the back porch together. He was putting together some toy or other, and I had my camera out and was waiting patiently to get that shot of the cardinal I posted not too long ago. I was so focused on the trees on one side of the yard that I wasn’t able to change gears fast enough to take a picture of the moment when this enormous hawk came floating over our yard and dove into the top branches of a tall tree a little further off in a neighbor’s yard.
The hawk emerged seconds later with another bird (black and obviously young) struggling in its beak. The hawk turned in the air dramatically and shot away, back over our heads and off towards the creek area, followed closely by a large crop of Very Pissed Off Blackbirds who dive-bombed this hawk and attacked it ferociously, trying to get it to drop the young bird. The screeching was incredibly loud. RegularDad and I watched this whole thing go down in amazement. In truth, the whole thing took maybe ten seconds tops.
“Holy shit! Did you see that?” RegularDad said to me. “Did you see that?”
I nodded, and then lamented the fact that it all happened too fast to get a picture of it.
“I can’t believe that,” RegularDad said. “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
For the rest of the afternoon, RegularDad existed in a state of utter amazement. At least twice an hour, he’d turn to me again and say: “Unbelievable! Seriously unbelievable. I never knew birds did that kind of thing.”
Finally, I said to him, “Why don’t you look it up on the Internet and see what you find?”
“Yeah,” he said, still in awe. “Yeah. I’m gonna.”
The next day I asked him, “So, did you ever look up that bird-thing online?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Really? What did it say?”
“It said: birds do that.”
