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| High Voltage Hawk |
I stopped to check out Bando on the way up to the Cliff House overlook today, but he was busy preening and seemed in no hurry to start hunting, so I rode on. The ocean had been super-calm yesterday, with very light wind and almost no swell under a sunny sky, and today was also calm, with a breeze rippling the surface a bit under cloudy skies. Not much bird action other than a few surf scoters, gulls, and cormorants. The four willets who'd been feeding on the beach in front of Sutro Baths the last couple of days were gone.
On the way back down the hill I noticed that the leg-banded juvenile red-tail I call Bando was no longer on his light post. Oddly, he was on the road below it. I stopped and whipped out my camera to see if he'd caught something, instead catching him just as he took wing with empty talons.
He flew over to a highly built-out power pole on Balboa Street, and a second juvenile red-tail flew into a nearby cypress tree just as I was getting over there. Bando soon flew over to the tree as well -- not to shoo away the interloper, but apparently just to say hello. He didn't stay for long before winging it across the tiny Balboa Natural Area to land on a perch of his own along the Great Highway (a perch that had been occupied by a raven who flew away with a squawk).
P.S. I just finished reading The Wager about the last sailing adventure of a ship by that name. It was an excellent story overall, with interesting characters, incredible hardship and resilience, and the conundrums and meaning of justice. But I also I liked the little reminders about the nautical origins of common sayings such as "three sheets to the wind" for loose sails putting a ship out of control, and "under the weather" for putting sick sailors below the weather deck. Now the next time I feel under the weather I'll at least have a clear picture in my mind of what the heck I'm talking about.
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